


The Three Fates

by EmilysRose (orphan_account)



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate dimensions in an AU fic, DL;DR, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, OS, Past Non-Con, Time Travel AU, dark fic that ends up happy in the end, faeries!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-08-05 21:37:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16375439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/EmilysRose
Summary: The three Archeon sister’s find themselves tied to a fate bigger then themselves as they all end up in Prythian. They find themselves falling in love, going on adventures, and living a life they never would have imagined—and it all seems tied around the mysterious Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court, who seems to be the mastermind behind fate itself.ORElain is taken to Prythian by High Lord Tamlin. Her two sisters do what they have to to get her back. Feyre finds herself struggling just to survive--and heal. Nesta finds herself questioning her prejudices and life as she's surrounded by the Night Court. And Elain realizes that she's not the kind of girl that needs to be saved, not by anyone.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Forewarning, this is very, very OS. Some sprinkles of OC.
> 
> There is a non-con warning on this, it's a past non-con. I don't know if I'll go very heavily into it, but the trauma will be explicit, so if you're triggered DONT READ. (Feyre and canonical Rhysand).
> 
> The violence is explicit. The story will be a dark!fic, and it has cannon-character deaths (basically, Feyre). There is a happy ending, though, so huray for that. And also, hu-fucking-ray for Feysand (favorite hetero ship evverrrr).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhysand POV (as a kind of prologue)  
> Feyre POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, this is a massive story in my head so bear with me here. It's going to be a LOT of character and world building.
> 
> The only massive difference in the begging is that Feyre is not beautiful. She was attacked as a child (non-con TRIGGER WARNING), and her face was damaged heavily in the attack. 
> 
> Fae and humans don't live in the same world. The human world is going to be European feudalism. Fae are going to be more Fae (so nothing modern like plumbing or cans of soup and stuff like in ACoTaR). 
> 
> Like with all my stories there is lots of swearing, because I fucking love to swear. And it's a dark! fic, so come prepared for that angsty-angst-angst.

**RHYSAND POV**

My brother turned to me. All eagerness and love.

“Amarantha wants to be with me.” He said. The beginning of the end. “She thinks were mates. That she can find a way to get the bond to snap into place.” I had never seen him so happy.

If I had known, I don’t know if I would have stopped him. If I could have denied him any kind of happiness. Even if I knew what it would lead to—to my slavery. To my broken soul. Not when I could see that smile lighting his somber face.

But then, what do I know?

 

What came first, life or despair? Did it crawl inside of us or did we crawl inside of it? When does brave not look like being brave?

* * *

 

 

 

**FEYRE POV**

I could hear the yelling before I even rounded the bend of the road: loud, furious yelling.

"You're cart was already turned over when I got here!" Curious, I made my aching legs go a little faster, careful not to slip on the loose slush the snow had become. "And you're grandmother? She shouldn't have mouthed off to me!"

The trees curved--and I saw it. A man in fine travelling clothes--too fine for the muddy road that went nowhere--stood on the muddy, snowy road. His cloak hood had been thrown back to show the shock of his pretty hair, dripping from snow. 

Closer to me was a farmer's cart, lying on its side, its wares scattered across the brown slush. An old woman in a threadbare shawl and brown dress was on the ground, lying in the scattered barley and old apples. There was even a bit of wheat grain, as if the old woman's farm had been planning on trading a bit of extra bits of goods before planting season started. 

The old woman was moaning and rolling and crying in the snow, holding onto her leg with one arm and trying to desperateness scoop up the scattered grains with the other. 

Between the old grandmother and her cart--and the loud, rich man--was a young boy. His back shook, either from the cold or fear or anger, I couldn't tell. But his chin was held high and his fists were shaking at his sides. He did not look back at his old grandmother, or me.

I moved forward, my old boots making sucking noises in the wet, icy mud.

"What kind of manners do you peasants have? Of course! No manners at all! You're all lawless heathens who don't know the difference between your ass and your fucking mouths." The man was snarling into the little boy's shaking frame, his fingers pointed, his face growing red.

No one else was on the road. Not at this time of day, not during the dead of winter. It was surprise that either of them were here, so far from any town or market.

The old woman was weeping as she shoved piles of snow-filled barley into her chest. As I walked up, she stilled at the sounds of my boots, looking up. The second she saw me, her body grew still and her eyes horrified. Her pain seemed to disappear in her panic as I crouched down. The doe I had slung over my shoulders rolled and almost made me loose my balance as I dropped. "What happened?" My voice was hoarse with disuse. It had been too long since I'd talked to anybody. This winter was particularly harsh and I'd found myself days away from home, searching for any sign of an an animal bigger than a fox or rabbit. I'd almost been desperate enough to try my hand at a hibernating bear before I'd found the deer--and the wolf.

"Sweet Mother who graces us with Her love and light--" The woman whispered her words, her mouth moving more than the sounds releasing from her wrinkled lips as she trembled. Her hand rose up, making a familiar sign of warding off evil; Kissing three of her finger tips before rising the back of her fingers to her forehead. 

 _No help here, then_. I reached around her, ignoring her flinching from my icy, dirty, bloody hand as I grabbed a bag of barley behind her head. I dumped half of it out on the muddy ground before snatching up as many apples from the snow that I could.  _Better in my sister's belly than yours_ , I thought, not able to look at the old woman as she trembled and spoke her half-whispered little prayer.

The man was still yelling: "You're just some dumb brute! Some inconsequential little bug that farms my food and is good for nothing--nothing--other than the piss and shit it takes for you to toil the soil!" His face was getting redder and redder. "Why are you even out here you little shit? Isn't there a peasant road for you? Shouldn't you be in the cemetery burying that old hag?" It didn't look like he was going to stop any time soon. I grabbed an extra apple as I watched him scream into the boy's trembling form. 

I had dirt on it. I rubbed it absently on the old woman's hip--the only part of her coarse dress that was clean--before grabbing the doe's legs and hauling myself up. It was an effort, three days of the damn thing on my back really had my thighs trembling. But I got up, only backsliding on the snow once.

The grandma was still mumbling her prayers.

I put the apple to my mouth. Widening my jaw as much as I could despite the broken nature of it, I snapped at the skin. The crack--more from my jaw then the apple--was loud in the air. Loud enough that the rich man looked over the boy's head.

He stopped cold. His mouth hung open. His eyes started to widen.

I munched on my apple, ignoring the little pops and sharp pains that accompanied it. Tiny pieces of it fell out of the sides, dropping down to the floor because I couldn't  _actually_ close my mouth.

The boy noticed the man's expression and he jerked his head over his shoulder. His own eyes widened in fear. He even stepped closer to the man, his eyes glancing towards his grandmother at my feet, still mumbling her little prayers that the Mother should save them all.

I wanted to tell her that the Mother saved no one. That She was the biting cold and wind of Winter. The blistering heat that shone during Summer. The Mother let injustices like  _this_ happen, and did not punish the strong and powerful and rich--but the old and young and poor. It was better to curse Mother Nature, She paid attention then. 

But I couldn't. I had a role to play. 

"Fear," I said, my voice still hoarse from a week with only trees and snow and animals for company. It had a good enough effect though, with the snapping of my jaw and the how half of the apple fell out of my mouth as my tongue moved in the too narrow space between broken teeth. "You have entered into a realm that you don't belong. Your Gods are long gone, here, on this cold and lonely road." The lines were from  _A Faeries Delight_ : Nesta's favorite play. She'd read it aloud to Elain sometimes. 

It was times like these that I wish  _I_ was powerful. That I had inhuman strength, or the ability to conjure up witch's illusions. If I had power, I could stop the man from thinking  _he_ had any power. Or, at the very least, scare the piss out of him as I grabbed the cart and threw it upright on it's wheels.  

I had other tricks, though. Apple in hand, I slowly--very slowly--pointed at him. My hands were covered in the doe's blood, the wolf's blood, and the dirt from my travels. Though my hands were perfect normal, they looked monstrous in the shining winter's light. I waited a beat, watching the fear take over the man's trembling frame. "I curse you, merchant." Because he was a merchant. No one else so rich would be so far north, and the crest on his cloak was a half-familiar thing from my father's old ledgers.He belonged to some guild who traded in exotic--and inconvenient--goods. "Your money will turn to stone. Your riches will be taken. Your future will be set in the bleak poverty you condemn." I paused as the man nearly dropped to his knees. "Unless..." I smiled, knowing it was no smile he saw, but the widening of a wet, broken mouth. "You supplicate me." I looked to his belt. "Give me your purse-string."

He grabbed for his purse string, nearly tearing it in half as he tried to undo the ties on his fine leather sword-belt. He flung it out onto the ground without hesitating. I dropped my hand--and as if released from some terrible spell, he turned, fell, and ran to his horse. He was gone in moments.

I had a second of joy, of power, before the boy was slamming into the snow in front of me and bowing, his hands up in supplication. He couldn't have been older than twelve. "Please, spirit. Do not hurt us." He said, tears falling down his face.

He'd been strong when the man was yelling at him. Strong and fierce. Now...

I started to walk. He flinched as I crouched down in front of him, looking away sharply as if making eye-contact would curse him, too. I grabbed the purse and lifted up, nearly loosing the doe on my shoulders. It was a heavy purse. Obviously the merchant had already sold his wears to whoever was crazy enough to live this far north without a village's protection. I looked through it, tossing the lamb's skin bag to see the flashes of gold and silvers inside. 

"Help you grandmother." I said, flinging him a gold piece and watching it fall harmlessly into the snow in front of him. 

With nothing else left to do, I walked away. As I did, I could hear him scrambling for his grandmother in the snow. Hear her whisper soft voice growing louder as she talked of curses and dark, dark days ahead.

* * *

 

This winter had been harsh and cruel to me. Every other hour had me silently cursing Mother Nature as I walked, sometimes silently and other times out loud--just to hear something other than muffled, snow-filled silence. 

It was better than some winters, but still made me hunt too far from home. I didn't even want to count how many days my sisters had gone without food. I'd left them with a bit of leftover meat and potatoes, and of course Elain had her garden...

 _Fucking bring me Spring already, you cruel cunt_. I thought, hurrying a bit more through the woods as a blind kind of worry hit me. I took to a familiar shortcut in the woods I knew would lead to the back of our cabin. The barley and apples were a heavy weigh tin my hand, the does a heavy weight on my shoulders. The rabbits I'd quickly killed in traps swung against my legs, heavy on the rope-belt I'd swung on my hips. I don't know when I started, but I found myself running by the time I saw the cottage. My chest heaved with the exertion, my breath streaming vapors into the air.

The cabin sat there, little and made of stone. It was half caved in on itself. Elain's little plot of a garden had sacks around the more delicate things that froze in the cold. Her beats had been taken out, her potatoes gone. The snow covered everything around the cabin in a pristine blanket: they hadn't left the house since the last snow fall, three days ago. 

I nearly fell into the trunk of the tree, the weight of the doe making my topple over, as relief crashed into me. I let the gray sun soak into my skin.

I could hear them through the badly set windows. Elain was singing, her high voice delicate and gentle as she told the story of a long lost love on a white horse. Nesta's deeper, more mature voice sung a wordless melody to accompany it.  _Home_. Or the closest thing to it.

I walked around the edges of the cottage, peaking through the warped window to see them. They'd lit a fire inside so it was warm and glowing. Their singing added to the picture, though I still couldn't see them.

At the doorstep, I knocked my boots against the frame--Elain's voice faltering inside, Nesta's stopping dead--before I opened the door and walked inside. The fire was roaring, so large and hot in the hearth that it felt awful against my cold skin. Inside was cluttered and clean. Sage, parsley, basil, caraway, garlic, and mint hung in clumps on the ceiling, giving the smokey room a distinctive smell that I always associated with the place.

Elain was sitting on a stool beside the fire, a blanket around her shoulders, her head on the mantle as she stared at nothing. Nesta was on our only chair, her beaten up old book open in her lap, her fingers around--

"You're knitting," I said, shocked. I'd never seen my oldest sister knit before. I had no idea she was capable of something so... homely. Or useful.

I walked in, letting the cold air sooth my suddenly too hot skin as I walked into the cozy cottage. With a grunt, I lifted and dumped the doe onto our table. It fell with a meaty kind of weight, all of it's blood--mostly--leaked out on the walk here.

"And you're disgusting." Nesta sneered.

Ah--it was going to be one of those days. I sighed, turning around and closing the wooden door that didn't fit right in the frame. The rabbits swayed against my leg, the burlap sack hitting the floor. Apples rolled.

"Apples!" Elain lunged for one as it made its way past the table.

"Careful," I said, smiling at the delight in her face. "Clean them first."

"And where did you get those?" Nesta's voice, as always, was a sharp crack in the still air.

"I bought them at market," I said, in my sweetest voice. Leaning against the wall, I whimpered as I slid down. My boots were nothing more than leather scraps nailed to a board. Wet mud and snow and water leaked in and out more than I'd like, but I'd taken some deer gut and used them as the lining for my socks to keep out the wet after I'd lost two of my toes to frostbite. I took off those boots tenderly, putting them next to my sisters', then took off the rabit's fur and deer gut socks I wore. 

I didn't want to stand up. Standing up sounded painful.

Elain, on her stool again, was eating an apple with delicate care, humming as she munched. Her joy was palpable, her body swaying as her eyes closed. The sight of it made something in my chest ache--and it gave me the strength to stand.

"How long until that... deer," Nesta's voice seemed to sneer, "is ready?"

"Dunno, how long will it take you to clean it and skin it?" I asked, grinning.

Her eyes flamed. My oldest sister, Nesta, was the most like our mother in looks; she had mother's coloring, mother's face, mother's eyes. Her skin was pale and blemish-free without a pock mark or pimple in sight. Her wide mouth was like mother's... and her eyes were the same' slanted upwards, narrow, a grey so cold it rivaled the winter snow banks as they assessed and condemned. Nesta's temper, though, came from our father. She'd had it long before we'd become impoverished and long and it seemed to only grow worse and worse as they years rolled by and her frame grew thinner. As the oldest of us, she was the one with the longest memory of... before. Before mother died, before the debt collectors came. 

"Temper temper," I teased. "With an attitude like that, no wonder no man wants you." Nesta rose from her chair, the book flopping to the clean wooden floors. "Poor, sweet sister, forever a virgin."

She screamed. She grabbed her shoe--a ridiculous flimsy slipper--and tried to throw it at me. I didn't even bother to dodge it. My laughter fueled her and I made sure to keep the table--and the dead deer--between us, shifting and swaying on my aching thighs to keep out of reach of her claws. I knew what those impeccably clean and manicured nails could do to a person, once she got close neough.

I was grinning so hard my jaw and cheeks were aching. "Come on--is this how you woo those town boys?" I teased.

"I will kill you!" She screeched.

She moved fast, despite the heavy skirts that swayed around her legs. I hardly had the time to vault over the table and towards the door before she was coming after me. I threw it open with my shoulder and rushed outside on bare feet--still numb and aching from hunting. My footprints--the tracks I made when coming here--were the only thing to mar the snow. Breathing hot fog, I dared her to come out, wanting her to come into the snow and chase me like she had when I was a little girl. Or, at the very least, leave the threshold of our little cabin.

But she didn't. Instead, she grabbed the door and hissed, "Stay out there--you stink like dog piss!" And she slammed it shut.

The slime dropped off my face and I stood there, feet numb, chest aching with an old, familiar, worn-down pain. Nesta had never been a warm sister... I tried to remind myself of that as I looked down at the tracks. How long had they been cooped up in the cabin? A week? Longer? I hadn't seen them leave in months... not since old Baba Yaga's last story night. 

Inside, Nesta was raging and throwing things--complaining about the dead animal on her clean table, about the leftover smell of me that lingered in the air.

A few seconds later, the door opened. I looked up at Elain--still wrapped in her blanket--as she gave me one of her sweet, delicate smiles. She placed a clean pair of my clothes on the doorstep. I nodded my thanks to her as Nesta snapped, "Get back inside!"

Elain gently closed the door.

If my oldest sister was rage and fire and steel--than Elain was sunshine and sweetness and the gentle growth of things. She had wide brown eyes--though neither of our parent's had brown eyes--and round, feminine features. There was no one that could not lover her. No one that she did not love in return. 

I turned and left the clothes on the doorstep, not wanting to soil them as I walked to a stream a little ways away from the cottage. I'd dug a trench in it for irrigation so Elain's could water her garden easier, and I walked downstream of that trench. It took off all my sweat and snow and blood covered layers off one by one: my cloak, my heavy over shirt, my undershirt, my pants, my long-johns. All of it, till I was a shivering, naked mess in the snow and sunlight.

I wondered, as I always did when I was naked, what would happen if someone saw me.

There were lots of tales and stories of it: of a human man coming upon a beautiful fae woman as she bathed. Or a beautiful fae man coming upon a mortal woman as she bathed. Sometimes clothes were stolen and curses made. Sometimes it was love at first sight. My favorite had to be the tale of a man who stole the clothes of a beautiful fae woman, refusing to give them up until he made love to her. Cunning and sweet, she made a bargain: she would make love to him, but he must marry her first. Not knowing what a bargain with a fae meant, they made love in the bank of the lake she'd bathed in, then tried to walk away. She followed him, and at every town they stopped in, she asked to be married by a Priestess. 'Not yet' he'd say. After the third town, he agreed. He set her up in a cabin outside the same village and returned to her once or twice every other year to make love. He gave her three children, three beautiful girls, who he loved more than anything. He visited often to see them. His wife, the ancient fae woman, made him promise on the lives of their daughters never to come into the house while she was asleep. One year, he did. Either ignorance, forgetfulness, weariness, or lack of care made him walk through the door at night after seeing her asleep, beautiful and wonderful, in bed. The second he did, the spell the mother had enchanted on her half-mortal daughters to keep them locked inside the house, used to keep the mother beautiful and mortal forever, ended. Their daughters sprouted wings and flew away. He never saw them again.

 _Would I ask the man who saw me to marry me?_ I thought, grabbing my pants and sinking them into the freezing water of the river to clean them.  _Only he wouldn't be asking to make love to me, but to not be_ cursed _by me._ The idea made me chuckle, despite the old pain in my chest.

I used my wet pants to clean my skin, trying to breathe despite the cold. I washed the blood and dirt from me. 

_If they looked at me from behind, would they see a too-thin girl past puberty? Would they think me beautiful, in a gawky way? I used to be beautiful, Mother, before you took it from me. As beautiful as my sister's._

Now my face was a puzzle shoved together, the pieces in the wrong spots. Muscles and bones broken that didn't resemble much of a face, skin that was scarred over and twisted what little of my features--mostly on the left side of my face--that I was able to use to express my emotions. I'd given little thought to my hair over the years, other than to keep out dandruff and knots, so I sheered it off close to the skull. My body... it was thin, so skeletal... I'd started to develop hair where there shouldn't be hair; on my back, my ass, my stomach, high on my thighs. As if my body was desperately trying to keep me warm with the little brown tufts because the bones and skin couldn't. As if I was slowly morphing into the beast Nesta claimed me to be.

No--I was no conventional beauty. But I did have a  _kind_ of beauty to me. A harsh and cruel, broken beauty that seemed to say  _I have survived_. 

"So fuck you, mother nature." I said, shaking so bad that the words hardly came out at all. I scrambled away from my stinking rags and hunting outfit as I ran to the door where my clean clothes lie. Let the rags freeze for a bit, I thought, coming into the cabin and flinching at the heat that came off the fire--as if it could burn my skin from across the room.

"Shut the door." Nesta hissed. "And do something about this dead thing."

"I'm hungry." Nesta said, eyeing the deer, her hand on her stomach. She looked reluctant to admit the meet would be in her mouth in a few hours.

I sighed, leaning against the door I'd closed. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, give me a second."

Looking at them--Elain on her stool, Nesta in her chair--I wondered what had happened to those three girl's after they flew away, freed. I wondered if they starved in a crumbling cabin at the edge of the woods. Or if their wings flew them off somewhere far away and beautiful. 

: her skin was pale, translucent, and blemish-free. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Faerie Story --with the mom and the dad and the little girls who fly off--is an adapted story from Neil Gaiman's Sandman chapters. 
> 
> Comment and tell me what you think!


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feyre POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's some world building--and Rhys.

 

I managed to get my sister's out of the cabin for Baba Yaga's story night. They put on their boots and cloaks and trudged through the village and snowy path into the woods ahead of me. I split off from them as I saw the other villagers, picking out my favorite tree--which I climbed--resting on a snow covered limb to overlook the clearing Baba Yaga told her stories in.

The old Hag lived in the forest somewhere, her cottage reportedly haunted. She came down once a month, on full moon, to tell a story to the village around a roaring bonfire. The entire village came--young and old--and stayed for a long as Baba Yaga decided to speak. Her old, gnarled hands rested on a walking stick as the light danced on her folded and rippling features. She was old, older than any person I'd ever seen in my life. Older than the grandmother hugging the barley and snow to her chest. Baba Yaga's hair was coarse and grey, streaming over her hood and down her back like a wiry pelt. Her eyes were deep sockets, and cruel in her much-lined face.

Her voice was was where her magic lay, though. It was old, withered, and almost a bit wicked. It was a fantastic voice for story-telling.

I'd heard about her stories from Clare Beddor, an old friend, as my family and I moved into the cabin. That was back when father was alive. Back before... everything. I'd come to that first story, sitting next to Clare on a warm summer's night, feeling like I was doing something naughty and dangerous as the villagers all came around the fire. I'd listened to the Hag's cruel voice in the night, falling in love with her faerie stories. The next month, I'd taken Nesta and Elain.

Now, Nesta and Elain sat with Clare. I stayed away, in the trees, not wishing to disturb the perfect peace of these nights around the bon-fire. I could see them from where I perched, see them huddled together, arm in arm, as they got a good spot right next to the fire. The dense smoke twisted and lifted, nearly obscuring them. Their heads were close together as they whispered to each other, occasionally looking over to the Voliage family, all on their own log. Arnel Voliage--the second youngest tanner's son--looked over at them just as much.

The wind shifted. The smoke moved towards the Voliage family and Arnel stopped looking their way to blink out the ash.

"All right," Baba Yaga said in her creaky old voice. "Quiet, you. Shhh..." Her hiss echoed through the darkness, through the trees. the leaves picked it up and they swayed with the sound across the clearing. Then all was silent.

"What kind of story shall I tell you tonight? What of a young girl who killed the wrong creature and was sentenced to a life with a beastly Fae-prince who needed her to break a curse? What of pretty little children who wondered into the wrong woods and found themselves at a cabin with sweets and pretty trinkets, who crooned at them to come inside only so she could eat them and take their beauty? What of a young girl, unaware that a fae-beast had taken her grandmother's skin? Or a woman, so desperate to escape her slaving step-mother that she made a deal with the fae for a night with a prince, and ended up with a bastard son? I know many stories."

"A love story!" Someone shouted out. Clare, by the sounds of Elain's giggling and the way Nesta shifted in her seat. Arnel Voliage's eyes seemed to grow hungry as he looked through the smoke to them.

"A love story." Baba Yaga crooned. "There are many Faeries stories of love... but what kind. To what end?" Silence reigned as she worked her wrinkled lips together, twisting her ancient lined face. "Ah, I think I will tell you one that ends happy--happy for a Fae story. One of mortals and adventure." Agreement sounded from everyone but a few, who called out suggests for something else. The Hag tisked, and the crowd stilled.

"Yes, I will tell you a love story. Once upon a time..."

I snorted, looking away from the clearing towards the sky. My body was tired, just one big ache. I should be resting in bed or stretching or tanning--but I always came. And I always stayed. I couldn't resist a good story. So I shifted on the harsh bark and watched the cloudy sky roil and moved, hiding the beautiful full moon from sight.

"A young mortal girl was born in a time before the Separation of humans and Fae. When mortal and immortal mingled and magic was a wild, dangerous thing. Humans, as you know, where slaves to their masters, their Gods, and Fae were slave to nothing but their own laws and savagery.

"This young mortal girl was pretty as a flower, delicate as the peace between the Fae and human..." I grinned, staring up at the sky, seeing the image of a woman in the clouds, bunched over... as if she were gardening. Yes, that woman was gardening. Her hair streamed behind her in a huge, puffy dark cloud, her mouth working into a crescent of a smile as her dress turned to wisps below her. "Let us call her Melinda. Melinda lived a happy, easy life. Though she struggled, she was kind and unhardened by the cruelties of Mother Nature."

 _Fuck you, Mother Nature_. I prayed.

"She did not know that a Fae man watched her, night and day, enthralled by her beauty, her kindness, the shape of her mortal soul." In the clouds, a darker shape loomed--the night sky opening to show blackness, the grace of stars. Closer and closer that dark blackness got to the she kneeling, smiling woman.

"He did not reveal himself to her until, one day, he realized that she was going to marry a human man. And he thought that just once, he'd like to talk to her and offer her the chance to be with him. If she did not take up his offer, he would leave her to the peace and happiness of her new husband." The darkness was there, upon her. Clouds shifted, her form becoming indistinct. The night sky had become a large, black, carnivorous thing. "She fell for his beauty instantly, as he knew she would. His face was grace incarnate, his eyes shone like moonlight, his hair gleamed like liquid gold. This Fae was of the Elven Fae, a being that is not unlike humans in proportions, which belied their great and terrible power. He saw her awe and he confessed his love to her right then and there! Before witnesses, before her family, before her mortal love, he told her of how he had known Melinda her entire life, too shy to come and speak to her." The darkness did not move.

"She was not a silly, stupid thing. She knew of the fae, knew that if she took his hand, if she accepted his love, then she would be his. Not as wife, consort, or friend--but as a human slave. A pet. Yet in her heart, she longed for excitement and magic. She could feel all the hopes she'd ever had, filling her to the brim so she exclaimed into the day 'take me away!'" The shrill sound of Baba Yaga's voice echoed then died off, bouncing through the tall trees before being swallowed up by a winter's night.

I looked down. There, in the circle of light, Baba Yaga sat. The flames danced to show pockets of shadows on her old and withered face. Mysterious and cold, she seemed a mortal woman made immortal by her very age. As if she was a thing willing to withstand the test of time to tell the story of love.

"This Fae Princeling, he truly did love his little mortal girl. He cherished her and gave her everything and anything she could dream to ask for and things she had never knew existed." I looked back to the sky. I traced the clouds for the images of a woman dancing in the dark, star-filled night.

"Her dresses were fine and fantastic. Her jewelry expensive and shining. Her days, though, were the gifts she'd dreamed to ask for; filled with laughter and plays and music and dancing and charm. She drew in the gardens and she watched magic light up her peaceful life. Her nights, her nights were the things she had never known existed. Long and wonderful nights where she shared her Fae Princelings bed." Not even the children groaned as the cloud-woman and the darkness collided, blending, becoming a thing that was indistinguishable from the both. There was a head tilted backwards in ecstasy, most just a long, lean column. There was a hungry mouth of blackness and starlight. There--the perfect blending of limbs that led to wisps of clouds and twinkling lights.

"The Fae Lord, the Princelings father, he was displeased at his son's attention to a moral woman. Displeased that a piece of property would be treated so well. In his fury, he declared that he would take the mortal woman and have her work for the things that she'd been given. The easy and gentle days became hard, toiling days in labor deep, deep under a mountain. She fished in living stone for the diamonds and rubies and amethysts and emeralds that used to grace her neck and ears.

"One night, Melinda found that the Faeries bleed blood like any mortal, blood that's as read as any mortal's blood. Her Princeling took her from under the mountain to take her back to his bed. And the Lord, upon finding them, flew at the both with fury. She watched, horrified, as her Princelings lover slaughtered his own father for his threat upon Melinda's life and his own happiness." The sky was blank. Strange bits fo clouds and darkness blended on each other to make--nothing. No shapes, no shades, no stars. Just darkness. As if the sky was waiting for something to happen.

"The Princeling had done a strange and terrible thing for killing his father and Lord. The patricide was not frowned upon, no, not by blood-thirsty Fae, but the power and magic of a Fae's Court tremble's at the change of leadership. The boundaries that make up a Court becomes thin and malleable. Magic inside the boundary, in the Court itself, becomes chaotic. And it stays that way for a month, precisely. A new Lord of a Court must prove his might and strength to the magic itself in that month, while fighting off the hungry fae from outside the Court.

"The Princeling recognized the dangers of his actions, of how the Courts on his border would come and attack him and try to swallow his land hole. He would need to act, and act fast." The stars began to shine, peaking out through the clouds, dancing upon the blackness. It shined on the light of the clouds that moved swiftly through the skies, glowing pale white from the moon. "He could handle the politics of his own Court. Handle the chaotic magic. he could send his armies to defend his boarders to the South and East... but he could do nothing for the land to the North. For the land to the North was the biggest, most ancient, most terrible land. Bigger than any other Court, in it roamed monsters the likes of which even the Fae--the God's themselves!--trembled at the thought of. And ruling it all was the ancient and terrible Fae Lord, feared by all who are smart enough to feel danger breathing down their necks..."

Shining, brilliant darkness. The moon peaked out, casting long shadows on the trees, adding a second light source to the clearing below. I looked down to see my sisters--my beautiful sisters--shining on the light of the moon.

"The Princeling could do nothing about the threat to the North and he knew it. So he called upon the Lord of the North for a treaty. He pleaded with that ancient Lord not to take away his territory and land.

"The ancient Lord was crafty, though, and defined his terms as only one thing; the thing that the Princeling valued most. The thing that the Princeling had killed his father for. A twisted bit of irony, that. A faerie special, as you well know.

" 'No, never', said the Princeling.

" 'Then you will have no kingdom to house her', said the old Lord. 'And to tell you only truths, I had no idea that your territory was unstable before you contacted me for peace. All your gall has earned you is the interest of my armies. They have had no bloodshed in quiet some time'. And the ancient Lord's laughter was terrible. 'I am in no mind to deny them their fun', he said.

" 'You are cruel', said the Princeling. But he was helpless int he face of such old power. He thought quickly on the subject. 'I have killed for this woman, for the love that I hold for her. And because of that, she is, in terms of value, more important than even the subjects of my own kingdom'.

" 'Careful with such talk', the ancient Lord said. 'You will be amazed at the ears and tempers of citizens scorned'.

" 'She is worth to me my kingdom, Sire', the Princeling said. 'And to trade her like a common slave denies her true value'.

"But the ancient Lord had been playing the game of courts for far longer than the Princeling had been alive. He agreed to the Princeling's thoughts immediately. 'That is true. I would not want to deny a woman the value she holds. I say we make her free-give her the choice of free will. She will come with me to my court and from there... well, she will have all the responsibility and actions of a person, not a slave'."

I couldn't help but smile, gazing up at the sky and shining stars.

“It was more than the Princeling could dream of. He called in Melinda and he told her what had to be done. She cried and wept, going down onto her knees and begging her Princeling not to let her go. That they could survive what came next, together. ‘No,’ The Princeling said sadly. ‘We cannot—go, go and come back to me. Find me’.

“And he handed her over to that ancient and terrible Lord of the North.”

Clouds pulled in. A hand reaching out. A cry in the night like that of a coyote screamed and screamed somewhere off in the distance. “He took her to his court, deep, deep into the north. He gave her a room, he gave her food, and for weeks the beautiful, kind Melinda wept. There in the North, there was no music. There was no dancing. No fine clothing. No arts or gardens for her to roam. She was on a mountain instead of inside one. A cold and lonely mountain, listening to the howls and screams of the land around her, of the beasts most terrible.

“When finally she could cry no more, she drew herself from her bed. She went to that terrible and old Lord and she demanded she go home. ‘I am not beholden to you’, That ancient Lord said. ‘You, a woman I do not know, without even the right to demand I take care of you, for you are a free and able person. I give you food, I give you shelter, out of the kindness of my hospitality—but if you demand much else from me you will find my kindness can wither rather quickly’. And she screamed at him, and she wept, and she cried again. ‘Go—go find your way back to your Lover Prince’. He said.

“ ’How will I get down from this mountain?’ She begged.

“ ’I’ve no idea’. Was his reply.

“ 'How do you?’ She asked.

“ 'Magic.’”

My laughter bubbled up from my throat, a choked and strained thing as I tried to keep it quiet. It cascaded down from the tree to echo across the small clearing. People started to shiver as I looked back up to the sky, watching a night filled with stars and darkness and open-ended possibilities.

“Melinda considered his words. Again, she was not stupid. She decided then and there that she was done with her crying, done with her mourning. Instead, she talked to the people who lived on that icy and lonely mountain in the North. She asked them how they got down. What was beyond the safe peak of the Court’s palace. ‘Terrible demons’ they said, ‘Monsters of midnight and cruelty’ they said, ‘things that will hunt a human by scent and eat them alive’ they said. ‘Will you help me?’ She asked. They said: ‘No’.

“Undaunted, she grabbed a rope, she grabbed food, she grabbed a sword, and she grabbed fire. Slowly she worked her way down the sides of that terrible, horrible mountain. She found herself in a forest filled with beats and creatures that struck the heart of fear in immortals.”

A heavy, lengthy pause filled the air as Baba Yaga stopped in her story to put more logs on the fire. Those below moved, blinked, shifted—as if they’d been stuck in something and were surprised to be back inside the pasture, surrounded not by bated breaths but by willful laughter. No one spoke, though, and all attention went back to Baba Yaga as she settled back in for her story.

“I will not tell you of Melinda’s struggles in the Court’s lands. I cannot. It is between her and the wilderness of the Northern Territory—and it has never been spoken. The only thing that can be said is that it had taken her half a year and that when Melinda exited the forest and into the lands of the lover, which were secure before her, she was a changed woman. Starved, bruised, scarred, half-deranged… she looked up the easy lands of the new-Lord that had given her up… and she found it distasteful. There was easy laughter, smiling faces. Men chasing woman as a gentle breeze rocked the rose bushes and the jewelry they all wore glittered in the light of day.

“She turned and without saying a word to anybody, she began her travels.”

Such a peaceful black night. I leaned against the tree trunk a little bit more, my hands folded on my lap.

“After a year the new-Lord grew angry. He sent a message to the ancient Lord and demanded to know where his precious mortal was—and the ancient Lord came himself to laugh in the young Fae’s face. ‘You have given her up to herself. A woman who had decided to leave the man she loved for the opportunities of a better man’s love. Well, her fickle heart has changed again’. And that ancient and terrible Lord left.

“Years went by. Many many years. The young Fae Lord never heard a word of the woman he’d risked his kingdom for.

“There is whispers, though, of a human woman who claimed herself to be free. A traveling, wandering woman who never stayed in one Court or land for too long. They say she traveled everywhere, from coast to coast—island to the mainland. She had many children and many lovers. And when she was too old and feeble to travel much by herself, she gained the help of others. It is said that the day Melinda died, she’d decided that she was going to go home.”

The silence lasted a full minute. I grinned up at the sky as outrage cried out from below. “That wasn’t a love story!” Some yelled—I think it was Nesta, though her voice was quickly drowned out by agreements and cries.

Baba Yaga laughed. “That is a Fae love story—and the happiest that it gets, I’m afraid.”

 _She loved herself_ , I thought, wishing I could be down there, grinning and whispering it to the friends I used to have and the sister’s I’d been inseparable from. _It is a beautiful love story because she loved herself more than any man._

There were more angry mutterings, more yelling. Eventually, Baba Yaga got fed up with it. “You want a damn love story?” She crowed—and the crowd of children died down to hear. “Fine, I will tell you a love story. There was a girl who loved a boy. They were of the same socioeconomic class, the same race, the same species. They met, they talked, they fell in love. No one questioned their love. Eventually, they wed, had babies, and died of old age.” She hauled herself up by grasping her stick in gnarled hands. She stood, tall, back bowed, and threw her walking stick up and up in the air. “Off with you all!” She screeched. “Go away, you thankless creatures!”

The little ones—the youngest—were off in a mad dash. They screamed and laughed with each other as they rushed to the village that was their home. Some stayed, lingering, and I watched with interest as Nesta sent Elain off with Clare. She sat, alone, until she and Arnel were some of the last to sit around the fire with Baba Yaga.

They spoke to each other, huddling in the darkness. I leaned forward, swinging my legs over the branch, but they spoke so low I couldn’t hear. I thought about leaving, going to the ground to ease drop, but then Nesta gasped loud enough for me to hear. “You ask me so brazenly!” She screeched.

Arnel replied. He had a smile on his face, at least the half that I could see.

And Nesta… she was blushing. I’d never seen her blush before. Never seen her look the least bit vulnerable or charming or even feminine. I twisted my mouth as they stood and walked off together towards the village, arm in arm.

“Well, did you enjoy my tale?” Baba Yaga said. She was again on her log, her hands on her stick, her eyes to the flames. No one else was around, though.

For a small, a heart-stopping second—I thought she was talking to me. But then a low, amused, smooth voice replied, “It’s been a while since I’ve heard that one.” The words were said in a lover’s purr, a gentle caress on the senses. Then a dark, roiling chuckle filled the forest night, sending shivers through me. “And about five percent of it was even true.”

“Oh? Enlighten me, Old One.” I frowned, looking around—around—

A man walked from the dense crop of trees to my right. Back straight, covered in black, he walked till he was facing the fire with her. He was tall, taller than any man I’d seen before, with enough muscle and width to make it so that even with all his height he was in no way lanky. His shoulders broad, his waist narrow. Even though it was cold, even though there was snow on the ground—snow in his pitch-black hair—he wore… the strangest clothes I think I’d ever seen. Black, tight, almost like leather but only if leather had scales and straps. Not a thing meant for winter.

His ears were pointed, long.

I considered what I should do—if I should actually do anything at all. A Fae was here, not just any Fae but one of the ones that were powerful and looked a lot like a human would. An Elven Fae.

No one knew how the Separation happened. Some say the Nine Queen's built an invisible wall under the terms of a secret treaty. Others say the Fae had gotten fed up with human weakness and just decided to go to their Homeland, their Heaven. Either way, Fae didn't exist in the human realm anymore. Not even half-fae, half-human hybrids existed, after the Purge that burned the land after the Seperation. But Fae still existed out there in the world, coming over to the human world once a year on the same day for the Tithe, a holiday of celebrating Fae slaughter and kidnapping. But this was not Tithe. 

But so what if it wasn't? Who could police this Fae? Who could punish him for disturbing the peace of the world, the natural order?

 _Not me, that was for sure._ I sent a curse to Mother Nature, demanding to know why she’d put me in danger again.

“Well, about the only part of that story that was true is that Madja had a damn fickle heart.” The male Fae said. He had such a strange voice—as if the sound itself was of sex. No, not sex, I realized, but the best parts of sex. That nervousness before a first kiss, when two people gazed at each other with excitement and returned lust. That moment when the world leaves you and there is nothing but pleasure and heat. That was what his voice was. The sensuality before and at the peak of sex. “She bounced around from one love to another, that one. She didn’t choose Thino, either, he took her and he raped her in front of her family and that human man she was supposed to marry. He bragged to me about it, once. And he’d been planning on killing his father for centuries. It’s the only reason why his armies were up and mobilized so quickly. As for the treaty…” His laughter was filled with dark, glittering amusement, the kind that rang warning bells in my head.  _Predator_ , I thought,  _killer_. “She was the one who put in the bit about free will when she was given over, if I’m correct. Tricky little thing—she was gone from the court palace in under an hour, scaling down the mountain as if she were a goat. I think she ended up somewhere in the Ice Court, married to some human man for a time. Her lineage is still about, still has that same old treaty spell on them, marking their eternal free will.”

“Really? Where?”

I grew very still as the Elven Fae turned his head to look up at me in my tree. His face was the kind of golden brown that did not come just from the sun but from birth. His black hair played on a phantom wind, like spider’s silk, it danced in gentle wind. Even from such a distance, I could tell that there was something inhumanly beautiful about his face: the symmetry of it, the way his strong square jawline meshed with his sharp cheekbones, his pointed and strangely pierced ears. “Little human,” He called. “Why don’t you come down here and show us your bond?”

“What?” Baba Yaga’s voice cracked out into the night. “Someone is here? Why did you show yourself? Go—Go!” She waved a gnarled hand frantically at the Elven Fae, as if to push him away but didn’t dare touch him. “You must go!”

“There is no harm.” He had a very smooth voice, but one that sounded as if he were laughing, teasing—daring. “Come down here, little human girl.”

I had never talked to a Faerie before. _Mother Nature, if this is my time to die, you better be there on the other end of life so I can punch you in the face._

 I twisted on the branch, grabbing the rope I’d used to get up to slowly snake my way down. I often kept it there—knowing I’d have to put it back up and tie it again the next month—so I did that now, leaving it to walk to the edge of the trees.

The cloak I used when I wasn’t hunting was a very good cloak. I liked it for the heavy fabric of the hood, the way that it cast shadows on my face and didn’t reveal any of my features if I looked down to the ground. I did that now, trying to peak up and stare at them with my face lowered into shadows.

“Well?” The Elven Fae asked, voice caressed and frightened at the same time.

I couldn’t truly see his face, though. Or Baba Yaga’s. I didn’t look up as I took off the glove of my right hand and exposed the inside of my wrist to them, the glow of it reflected on smooth, white skin. There, like black ink spilled onto the flesh, was a symbol I’d been born with. My sisters had it too, as had my mother. Like a strange, too dark birthmark. It was the image of three spirals, connected at the center and twirling, twirling—all in the same direction.

None of us had thought much of it. It was something passed down. An accident of nature.

Baba Yaga took in a sharp breath. “I know you! You are the dark one! The beast in the forest!” Her trembling hand came up to her throat as if there was some great pain in her chest. “You are the thing that replaced that strange, sweet girl five years ago.”

“That girl was never sweet,” I said, voice flat. “In fact, I heard she was a bit of a bitch.”

The Elven Fae laughed, dark and sensual. I tried not to squirm at the sound as it reached me as if the very existence of it was like a hand trailing down my arm. “She can’t be a beast, Brinda.” I frowned, wondering if that was Baba Yaga’s real name. “She would not have the mark if she did.”

“A copy made to fool and deceive!” Baba Yaga hissed.

“I will leave you to your conversation.” I murmured, turning.

Before I could, though, his voice called out. No amusement this time, just darkness, just pleasure, just danger. He said simply, “I’d like you to stay.” I turned, not hiding my face. A challenge to him. To have him realize that he didn’t need me there after all. I knew they could both see it in the dull firelight because Baba Yaga was hissing and making the protection sign—kissing her three fingers, pressing them to her forehead—as hissing about my evil nature.

“She is the cursed thing in the night! The howler at the stars. The beast that stalks these woods and has taken the place of a human child, convincing those poor mourning sisters that they’re—”

“Shut up, Brinda.” The Elven Fae said. An order like that of strong-willed lover in the bedroom.

And I was rooted to the spot. Not because of Baba Yaga. Not because of her fear, her disgust… but because the beautiful, strange creature next to her was staring at me. Staring at me and not hissing, not name calling, not throwing anything. He was just staring, his expression never changing away from the sensual amusement that had been on it before. Amusement that was not mockery, either.

He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. No person—but thing. More beautiful than my sister’s lovely smiles. More beautiful than what it felt like to eat food for the first time in nearly half a month. More beautiful than the movement of dance, the sway of arms and expression of footwork. He was beautiful beyond anything that I’d ever experienced or sensed in my entire, small life.

I’d have never thought before now that a single person’s gaze could shake the very foundations of reality that I based my life on. But then, I’d never met a Fae before. And I’d never been looked at like this for years and years.

Since my accident, every interaction I had with intelligent life had failed to make me happy. At first, each jab, each flinch, each accusation had been a knife wound, sharp and biting. The part of my heart that received such disdain had grown callused though… and looking at him was like ripping off that callus to its very foundation and saying “look, look at what you used to have”. People took for granted what kindness a simple stare could give you. 

I did not fall to my knees and tremble, but it was a near thing.

“How are you here?” I asked, looking into his eyes. How long had it been since I’d had real eye-contact?

He arched an eyebrow, his hands going into the pockets of the… strange leathery thing he wore. It defined how good he looked, how muscular and strong he was. His shoulders were impossibly broad, his stomach showing the thinness of a man who had a strong core. And pockets—who would have thought they’d exist in such a strange outfit? “Am I not allowed to go where I please when I please?” There was something sharp and cruel to his face then, reminding me that he was indeed a predator that would kill me. More than just someone capable of seeing my face—he was an immortal soul that probably saw me as nothing more than a flash of light in his peripheral. To have me die… it would be nothing.

“You can.” I tilted my head, watching him. “I’m curious how.”

“Magic.” He said, breathing the word out like a promise.

Dangerous, I thought, looking him over. So very dangerous. “And have you come to eat out the heart of an old Hag?” I asked. “Or look for—what did you call her?—Madja’s decedents?”

“So you were listening.” He purred. “Good girl.”

Another moment of frozen, sliding reality as I realized what those words did to me. How heat and wetness and ache could come from such narrow and pointed area on my body. The shock left me quicker than before, but the ache did not. I had to walk past him to sit on a frozen log resting by the fire. Baba Yaga flinched from me as if my very sitting down could harm her.

Funny—that wouldn’t have bothered me before. I would have used it, done something… something cruel, probably. Pushed and pushed until I felt good and dark and lonely in my bitterness. Now it was like a fresh wound, one that made me tired.

“Tell me of the Fae World.” I pleaded, looking at the fire that was slowly dying down to bare flames and hot, steaming coals. I needed a distraction. I needed magic and thing that weren’t here, weren’t now.

“What is there to know?” He asked, sitting down between me and Baba Yaga. “We are immortal and never change, and when we do it is most… violent.”

“What is the most recent change in your existence?” I asked, turning to look at him.

He considered me, and I tried to ignore what that did to my soul. “A Fae woman—Elven—” He nodded his head to me. “Decided to crown herself as Queen.”

“Which isn’t normal?” I assumed.

“No.” His mouth twisted, and again, that predator peaked out, bare and naked without the sensuality to back it up. “No, it is not.”

“How does one immortal woman decide to rule over other immortals?” I pondered, looking up into the sky, into the darkness that the moon couldn’t shine through. “Did she put a curse on you? Take away your lovely human woman? Maybe she threatened to take away your family jewels.” I looked at his crotch. His legs were spread wide, the leather somehow allowing for a free range of motion.

His laugh was low, dark, sexy. “Such pointed questions. Next.”

“But—” I turned to him.

“Next.” He pressed.

“Why. Why are you here?”

He snorted, the most human gesture I’d seen him make so far. “Because I am desperate.”

“Why—”

“Can’t ask the same question twice.” His smile was a flash of teeth as if he was baring them, threatening with them. I noticed for the first time that his teeth were not human. The canines were sharp and longer than the others, the outer one next to it a bit shorter but just as sharp. Fangs, I realized. This man had fangs. “Next.”

“Are you playing a game with me?” I asked, curious.

“Aren’t you playing one with me?”

“You cannot answer with your own question.” I challenged, deciding that yes, yes I was. This inquisition game was what I needed.

He nodded his head to me, giving me that. “I am playing a game, young mortal. And you are slowly becoming a very interesting opponent.” His eyes sparkled—and I couldn’t tell if they were black or not. Something about them seemed black, but something about them also seemed very bright. At the moment, they were assessing, teasing, saying _play with me, if you lose I’ll eat you up, if you win I’ll eat you out._

My mind went blank for a second and his face was patiently amused before I could get away from the image of a dark head between my thighs. “What would make an immortal desperate enough to come to the human world?”

“A need for change.”

“What makes an immortal desire change?”

“A lack of new substance in a never-ending existence.”

 “Is your life truly never-ending?”

“To you, yes.”

“And to you?”

“It feels inadequately short and torturously long—depending on the mood.”

I considered the other part of my question. “Does it truly not change?”

“Everything stays the same yet changes ever so slightly. But,” He leaned in close as if to share a secret. “On occasion, yes, there are tremendous changes.”

“Because of humans,” I concluded. “And Immortal Queens.”

“This is not a question.”

Annoyed, I glared at him from the corner of my eyes. “How does a Fae come to the human world?” Maybe I could burn that way down to the ground in an ash heap. Maybe I could ruin any chance of a Tithe happening ever again.

“With magic, obviously.”

Annoyed, I shot him a glare. “Fine then, how would a mortal find their way to the Fae World?”

His fanged grin was so savage that I felt as if I’d played into his hands somehow. “They need to follow the faerie lights to the ring of life that has no mouth to call out to you, but their hands, their true selves, reach deep—deeper than you can see.”

I considered his words. “Are you talking about a tree-ring?”

“No.”

The game was quickly trying my patience. “What do you not want me to know?”

He mulled that one over. His jaw working. “Many things, personal things, extraordinary things.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“No.”

“You cannot repeat your replies,” I stated. “Try again.”

His body was shaking with his laughter, his eyes dancing—and I realized that his eyes were both light and dark. His eyes were the night sky, a pitch black but somehow the blackness glowed. “I do not.” I frowned. “Want to be more specific, that is.” He clarified.

“What to you is extraordinary?”

Another nod, another silent point to me. “The existence of a Fae Queen.”

I considered him, not finding a way to get around his answer…this game of ours was built to be unfair. I could chuck question after question at him but if his answers were always vague enough, I’d never learned anything. Maybe it was my problem. Maybe I just needed to learn how to ask more specific questions. I tried a different tactic, realizing what I didn’t know. “What is your name?”

He froze. Not in a human way, but in a strange, otherness kind of way. His whole body locking up and almost becoming stone. His eyes gleamed with something like hate, but much colder and crueler and older than hate. Like resentment. “You’ve played this game well—be careful how you tried on from here, mortal.”

“You stupid thing!” Baba Yaga hissed. “Have you not listened to me? A Fae’s name is their life—their essence.”

I knew the stories, though I hadn’t thought of them when I’d asked him. I’d just wanted to know what to call him… “Fine. You’ve answered—what do I call you? What is not your name and yet something you identify as?”

The coldness retreated as soon as it had come. His sensual amusement was back. “I go by many things. You may call me Rhys.” He said it like ‘reese’.

“Rhys…” I tested the words on my tongue. I realized, with his expectant expression, that he was waiting for a question. “Do you wish to know my name?”

“No.”

Ah. That was oddly painful. “Do you wish to know what people call me, then?”

“I already know what they call you.”

I opened my mouth, then closed in. “How would you guess my name?” I asked, smirking through the ache he’d caused.

“By asking Brinda.”

I laughed. “How do you know she will not just call me beast and consider that good enough?” For the first time since sitting down on the log, I looked towards Baba Yaga. Her face was furious, set in ancient lines that now demonized her long and old face. Either she found my presence that horrifying—though truly, how could anyone be horrified over me when I was just an ugly thing, no more and no less—or she was jealous of Rhys’s attention. He had come for her, originally. I watched her beady eyes in between the folds of her face and considered her.

“To her, that’s what you are.”

There it was, that old wound made fresh. I sighed. “Does this game have an end?”

“I’m sure that if we play long enough, yes. A few millennia or so and we’d lose the ability to have unrepeated answers and questions. The game would then be figuring out of we remembered these first, tentative plays.” He nodded his head. “Until next time, I suppose. I should be going anyway.” He looked up as if he could tell the time by the glowing moon.

“Why did you come here—”

“No more questions.” He said, winking at me. “Brinda, as always, you bring me the most wonderful people.” He grabbed her horrible, twisted hand within his own strong brown one and kissed it gently before letting it go.

“You’ve only just got here—” Baba Yaga gasped.

“And my time is at an end.” He said like a soft, gentle reprimand.

I also had no desire to stay. I stood and nodded to him—to Baba Yaga—before turning to follow my long-gone sisters back to my cottage. I did not turn back to look at either of them, though I desperately wanted to. The cold night bit at my skin without the warmth of the fire and I realized how very tired I was, how I’d been running on some indescribable adrenaline when I got to the clearing and now that the excitement of my first Fae interaction was done…

Bed, I thought, was so close, so tangible.

Then, of course, a warm voice called to me and shattered the idea of bed—or brought about a different kind of image with a bed. I turned to see Rhys, the Elven Fae, standing a few feet away, hands again in the strange pockets of his black leather… suit. “I want to give you a gift.” He said, no preamble.

I couldn’t arch my eyebrows anymore. Not really. I could, however, twitch the scar tissue to make it look like one of my eyebrows was lifted. He saw the effort and chuckled. “For the game. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one so… carefree.” He walked forward.

“Can I decline it?” I asked, taking a step back as age-old fear leaked into my body. It was all instinct, all whisper in the back of the body that told you to run, run for your life or be eaten.

“No more questions.” Is all he said before his hands were on either side of my twisted and broken face. I could tell, then, with his perfect hands on me—what was wrong with me. My right cheekbone caved in. My jaw twisted to the right, also caved in, as if it was trying to disappear into my neck and leave my upper jaw all alone. Scar tissue from when the bone had jutted out of the cheek twisted and reshaped the flesh on the left side of my face…my forehead incaved in some areas, bubbling up in others…

I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the tears. And then, with a deliberate slowness, soft and soothing lips touched my left eyelid—then my right. Kissing with gentle brushes of plush lips. I could smell… could smell rosemary on him, and sandalwood, and lemon. As if Fae did not smell of sweat or body order but instead herbs and spices. In seconds his hands and mouth was gone.

I opened my eyes to ask him what—

The night no longer looked the same. Pockets of shadows and darkness were deeper, yet less mysterious. The light shone in beautiful curves and arches, exposing such contract that I realized, suddenly, I had never learned to appreciate the night before. And Rhys… Rhys leaked darkness as if he was the night himself. It twisted in his fine black hair that was so dark it seemed to absorb the moonlight, eating it up. The darkness twirled from his shoulders, his exposed skin. It pooled around his feet like living smoke and elongated the shadows that morphed behind him, like a second being that shadow moved and shifted and shook with laughter. The shadow had eyes with a slit pupil, not like a cat’s, but crossed—as if there were two slits making an x mark.

“What.” I gasped.

He chuckled, and his eyes did shine with an inner light, a brightness like stars in a black abyss. He was somehow more beautiful, more terrifying, standing there. Like gazing at a magnificent, unreal creature and knowing that at any moment it would turn to flash its claws and drain your life away… but until then, you were helpless but to gaze at it. To appreciate the form, the movement, the majesty of a life greater and more powerful than your own.

“The sight,” Rhys explained. “I wanted to give it to you so that you can see all, feel all, know all that can be know from sight alone. So that you cannot be fooled. And maybe, with a bit of skill, you can use it to perfect that persona of monster you try so hard to cloak yourself in.” He nodded gently. “What do I call you?”

If I gave him my real name, I’d be in his power. Everyone knew that about the Fae. They owned a person’s mind, body, and soul once they had a name. “Fey.” I whispered, voice hoarse. I  watched his shadows dance and writhe with him.

“Ah.” He smiled. “Fey. It feels like a promise, don’t you think?” He flashed his fangs at me. “Goodnight, then, darling Fey.” And he was gone. Just like that—gone. There was no movement, no receding, just abrupt disappearance. The shadows were lesser without him there.

Very slowly, I turned and I walked towards the cottage. As I did, I realized that it might not just be Rhys’s influence but my new sight, too, that made the darkness creep back into light. With the moon back behind the clouds, the night was still bright—easy to see despite the density of it.

Inside the cottage, I walked to my little cot in the corner. I used to sleep in the bedroom with Elain and Nesta but… No. Not now. I didn’t want to think of painful things right now. Not when I felt raw and aching from the loneliness my twisted face caused. I wouldn’t think of the past, or the why of the present, I would not think of the future that might always be the same.

Instead, I fell into my cot, twisting the blankets around me, and let exhaustion take me.

 


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feyre POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NON-DESCRIPTIVE MENTIONS OF NON-CON. BE WARNED IF IT BOTHERS YOU.
> 
> also--I changed Feyre's thing from painting to dancing.

I woke to Elain’s gentle voice singing a lullaby from our youth.

_I will tear my soul in two. This will kill me as surley as it will kill you. Though you kneel there, trembling like fawns… realize that I, your hunter, will also never see the dawn._

It was a song our mother had taught us. And like everything our mother had taught us, it ended in death and tragedy. I’d never understood how Elain enjoyed them so much.

I opened my eyes, my body and face already facing the open cottage room, so I didn’t have to interrupt her by turning around to watch her. She was sitting in front of the fireplace, gently building it up with kindle and two thin logs of wood while the blackened cauldron sat on a spike, waiting for the flame. She was still in her nightgown, a thin, soft looking thing worn by time that exposed not her body but the willowy thinness of it. Her hair was unbound and flowing down her back. She was too thin. She was malnourished and had bags under her eyes. Her hair and nails had no shine to them. But she was clean. And she was there. And she somehow dared to have a smile on her face.

With a soft, aching voice, she sang the story of a woman who had to kill fae to keep her fae lover.

I tried not to think of Rhys. I failed.

 _Your sacrifices are true, your hearts forever pure. When you meet that waiting Cauldron, you will be embraced, like in softest fur. I will torment, wither and scream. Know this, your suffering is not in vein. I—the knife-will forever be stained_.

It felt like he’d known too much, given too much. I had no idea why he was there or how a Hag like Baba Yaga would know him but…but he’d been there. Smirking and teasing and exposing secrets left and right. Giving me more questions than answers.

And that devilish bastard, he’d left a gift behind. Now I couldn’t even pretend to forget him.

Nesta woke up. I watched her, also in her nightgown, walk from the bedroom and into the cottage main room. She was also exceptionally beautiful today, her thin limbs somehow not too thin, mostly because of how small she was naturally. Her face, strong and bold, exposed the temperate fire inside her. Her skin was just one shade darker, her hair at least three…

I loved my sisters. I loved them desperately, like a mother would love her children. Like a beggar man would love his opiates. They were everything to me. Family. Love. Human interaction. I would be here, in this cottage, doing everything I could to make sure they survived for as long as I lived.

Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if my older sisters had taken the responsibility of keeping us all together, all alive. I’d been eight when Mother died. Nine when the debt collectors and loan sharks and gangsters had torn Father’s fortune for everything it was worth and broke his soul as well as his wallet. Eight and a half when I stole some money to pay for this little out of the way cottage—an impulse, a desire for freedom from an estate filled with death and ruin—and nine and a half when I realized this little cottage hovel was the only thing that would keep a roof over our heads. I should have bought something bigger, we all agreed, but at least we had something. I was ten when I realized there was no money for food.

I hadn’t really waited. Hadn’t stopped to see what Nesta or Elain would do to feed and clothes us as our first impoverished winter approached. Instead, I paid a man in town one of Father’s old fine coats to teach me how to snare small animals. I was ten when I first killed a thing and realized that my soul will forever be blackened and cruel for doing it.

But I fed my family. A few more clothes sold—and I had a bow, an arrow, and a teacher. I was eleven when father died. Eleven when it seemed like neither sister would lift a finger to hunt with me or try any other method to keep up alive. They let me do what I felt I needed to keep them safe. I used to think that was liberation. Responsibility had made me feel loved. Needed.

If I had waited though? If I had acted my age? What would I be like now? Maybe I wouldn’t have been walking home from the village trying to sell rabbit skins and wouldn’t have gotten caught by the old, abandoned barn by a group of men. Maybe my face would be okay. My virginity intact, no hot, bubbling shame in my soul. My heart not so full of bitterness and fear and anger.

Maybe I would be lesser for it, though. If I hadn’t acted, I wouldn’t be the protector of my family, a survivor. Instead, I’d be a pretty little girl in an incaved cottage waiting for a man to sweep me up and marry me and take me to something a little richer, a little nicer. Or maybe I’d be living in the Town, having followed my eldest sister as she decided the only way to feed the family with her limited abilities was to be a whore. Nesta was smart. She wouldn’t have gotten caught up in drugs, wouldn’t have gotten beat down. Hell, if she had decided to whore, she’d end up owning a brothel by now. Or maybe we’d all be working at an Inn, having had a good chance of luck. Maybe Nesta would have been the world’s youngest upstarting merchant.

I had no idea. I hadn’t waited.

I’d been young. Malleable. In a way, I was more capable of the changes necessary to do harsh and horrible things than either of my sisters, who were used to a lavish lifestyle. At eleven, I was capable of making myself into something undesirable for the sake of survival.

Looking at them, watching Nesta hum to Elain’s miserable little lullaby, watched my oldest sister’s fingers braiding Elain’s beautiful hair… I was glad. Glad that it had been me who had made the first move.

I would conquer the world for them.

 

 

“You’re leaving?” Nesta asked, disdain dripping from her voice. She didn’t even look up from her well-worn book. “Off to go kill something, Feyre?”

“Oh, you know me and my blood-lust,” I said, shoving on my boots but not bothering to tie them on. I’d just be taking them off soon, anyway. “Gotta breathe, gotta kill.”

Elain’s little nose scrunched up. “Ew.”

“Don’t eat all the food while I’m gone.” I teased, reaching over to kiss Elain on her newly braided head. Because my bottom lip was stretched to take in my crooked and caved in jaw, it was mostly me pressing the side of my mouth to her head—but it worked the same way. I grabbed my cloak and left.

Neither of them knew about the purse string. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen once they got money—real money—on their hands. I didn’t want them to buy unnecessary things like lace and satin, like they always talked about. Though Elain did need a new dress… and Nesta was always softer when she had a new book to read… no. No, it would be an emergency fund.

For whatever reason, Nesta couldn’t seem to get it through her mind that we were poor—well and truly poor. She lived in a kind of half fantasy where she meddled with peasants as if was a trial to the great Queenliness she was destined for. The purse, for all its richest, would be pocket change to her and gone in the instant it took her to get to market in Town. No doubt most of it would be spent on Elain, but still… I would keep it close to me.

I grabbed it now, where my hunting rags and cloak lay in the snow by the stream. The clothes were half frozen and I beat them against a rock to crack their figures and reach inside for the purse. Outside, I hung the clothes in their customary place outside the cottage to soak a bit more water and maybe get a little cleaner before heading off to the village proper.

The ‘village proper’ was nothing more than a collection of three houses that belong to the Jensens, who were woodcutters, and had many elders and children. Their houses centered around the well. Outside of the village was the company the Jensens owned, the miller and his family’s home, an abandoned farmhouse that used to belong to a family that had grown rich and left this place, and many, many farms out in the distance.

I headed to the old barn now, ignoring the rotting wood and the horrible creak of it as the wind blasted down its side. Inside, the hay that had been left was rotten and thin, the ground nothing but compacted dirt. Because of the massive hole in the barn ceiling and the way huge holes between boards—the place smelled and felt like the outside world.

Here, I had bled. Here, I had been beaten. Here, I had been abused and desecrated and turned inhuman. It had taken five men and a single day… but here is where I had broken. My mother’s death, my family’s economic devastation, my father’s lack of spirit and then death, even the stain of animal blood on my hands—none of it had done to me what this barn, what those men, had done.

So here is where I decided to be selfish. To give myself time and a place to do the one thing in life that brightened my existence.

I shucked off my boots and felt the way the cold, dry earth came up to greet my frigid skin. I shucked off my cloak, laying it on a rusty peg. I stretched my still aching muscles, I felt the cold seep into my skin. When I was ready, and only when I was ready, did I grab the old barn door that was probably the only sturdy thing in the place and began my warm-ups.

A few grande plie, some single leg relieve, on the ground I did some bridging, hissing as I pushed my sore muscles into the splits and started some stretches, some leg lifts. I had an old scrap of cloth that served as an ankle band but I was doubtful it ever did much. It would be a horrible day that my little practices would hurt or sprain my ankle and my sisters would go hungry… but I was human. And I needed to have this.

I used to be a fine dancer. One of the best of my age. I can still remember the backstage, the prep, the dresses, the way I’d tighten the silk strands of my pointe shoes…remember the heat of the candles and gas lamps and what it was like to dance and twirl in time with my friends…

I used that now as I got up—bare feet on dirt—and danced. Remember the revelry. Remember seeing the dark expanse of black faces in a crowd watching as I lost myself in aching ankles and elegant limbs. Now, now I had no pointe shoes. Now I had no dance instructor, no set-list, no music. So I just danced. Twirled and lifted and jumped, watching my arms fan out, keeping my hands and fingers beautiful as I expressed sorrow, hatred, bitterness, joy, love. By the end I was a panting, sweaty mess inside the barn, gasping as I grew dizzy.

But I felt beautiful. Here in the place that had stripped me of my innocence one laughing man at a time. Here in the place that had stripped my beauty from me one savage punch at a time… I felt beautiful.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elain POV

I waited.  _Come on come on come on come on come on_ —

Feyre knew I was watching her. She always knew. Even before she’s grown hard and cold as the winter nights, she could tell when someone was looking at her. She knew. I know she knew.

“Stop bouncing around like a rabbit.” She said, not even bothering to turn her head to look at me.

I squealed, just a little. “Is it ready, is it ready?”

“Why so eager?” And from behind… yes, she was a little strange. Her hair was shaved in ugly patches. The stubble showed bare skin, exposed scars. The stubble was even grey—as if the color of her hair had deserted her. Strange, but she still held herself like the vibrant little sister I knew, twirling and dancing in her dresses till she fell in a laughing heap.

And then she turned around. And it was painful.

Painful to look at. Painful to imagine.

No one had known she’d even been hurt. No one had dared question why she’d been gone for weeks and weeks. I hadn’t even noticed it, too wrapped up in the hunger. I kept thinking  _she’ll be back, she’ll be back, we’ll eat again_ but she never came home. Nesta had stormed out in the middle of the night to search after the second day, looking like she was going out on a raiding party like a gallant knight. She’d come back bloody and shaking with coins jingling in her hands. She never spoke a word about what had happened—but I’d held Nesta while she sobbed that night and many nights after.

When Feyre came back. She came back… wrong.

More than the face. She terrified. It was deep down, a kind of cold, bitter hatred that shone in her dark grey eyes, always making me shy back. Her eyes—mother’s eyes, Nesta’s eyes—were nothing but the ice above a frozen lake. The cunning of a snake considering if it should strike now or later.

I don’t know if she realized it, but it was her gaze and her unrelenting nature that made people call her monster. The face just made them feel pain.

“Because!” I crowed, looking over her shoulder than right at her painful face. “There will be a party! And music! Art! Boys!” I jumped, screaming a little because it felt good to do it. I miss joy. I miss expression. I miss things that weren’t bleak. I wanted colors. I wanted dancing. I wanted laughter to rein.

“Boys.” Feyre drawled.

I faltered, just a step. Nesta was there immediately, speaking up with anger—always anger when it came to Feyre’s casual mockery. “Something out of your realm of possibility, I’d imagine.”

I hated it when they fought. I used to step in, used to smooth the anger with a joke, a word. The tension would disappear from the air and all would be right again. When they used to get into arguments without me near, I would see them chasing each other through our old house. I would watch as Nesta jumped on my tiny little sister, or the other way around. Sometimes I would jump on them, too. It would always end in laughter. We’d lay there, and we’d laugh till we cried. Whatever had happened between them, whatever they’d said to each other would dissipate like the bitterness of chocolate once sugar was put in.

No matter what I did now, my sisters did not laugh.

Laughter, in my opinion, was the world’s best medicine. If laughter did not exist, then there would be no proper way to express happiness. Then what would be the point? Without happiness, sunshine would just be hot and unrelenting, singing would just be a way to fill air and space, the touch of hands and the blush of new love would just be heat and desire. Happiness—happiness was the thing that made life worth living.

Mother used to tell me Nesta had been born old. That her birth had been her choice—since Nesta never did a thing that wasn’t her choice—to reprieve her mortal soul from whatever eternity she’d been living in. And she’d looked to the world for guidance, a way to heal her heavy heart… and couldn’t recognize the things that made life worth living. She was too suspicious to take the gifts of life because she saw how it could lead to pain. Mother hadn’t been alive when the change had entered Feyre’s soul. I always wondered what she’d say about it. When Mother was alive, all she ever said Feyre flew when she should have learned to crawl first. Maybe Mother would say that Feyre had fallen… and because she couldn’t crawl, she couldn’t get back up to the sky.

I used to be able to stop their hurt in its tracks. I used to be able to heal them, mend them, set them upright by showing them where they had gone wrong and the where their twisted emotions had caused their pain.

Now I knew to keep still and recognize the signs of the storm they brewed. Knew to wince before Feyre even spoke. She always knew where to hurt Nesta hardest. “Says the eternal virgin?” Her voice was always so cold. So bland. “What do you know of boys, hu?” I bit my lip as Feyre went on. It was always a bad day when Feyre pressed further. “Or is Arnel Voliage warming your frozen womb?”

I looked to my older sister, watching how she hid her shock and hurt with anger. “What do you know of it?” She snapped.

“Please,” I mumbled. They did not hear me. They never did anymore.

“I know he’s sweet on you.” A paused as Feyre stopped to observe, to gauge where to strike. “And you’re sweet on him?” Shock—mockery. “A peasant _boy_?” Her voice twisted to mimic Nesta’s accent. Nesta tried very hard to keep the tongue of merchants, that lilting, affluent tone. It was Nesta’s lifeline to a better life.

“You know nothing!” Nesta screamed.

“Please stop,” I said, watching them.

One day they’d really hurt each other. One day they’d break apart and there would be nothing I could do to help them.

“I know enough.” My too smart sister said. “Don’t marry him.”

I blinked. I heard the concern in her voice, though she hid it well. She was more like Nesta than either would admit. They both hid their hurt and their pain behind heavy walls—as if Feyre’s coldness or Nesta’s anger could keep them from ever being vulnerable. As if vulnerability was the cause of their pain.

“Why? So, you can keep me here in this hovel? Is your dream, sweet, sweet sister, to keep us here so we become as miserable as you?” Nesta asked, standing, ready to throw something again. I flinched back from the two of them as the space got smaller and smaller. As if the cabin couldn’t contain the force of their personalities. “Maybe we too will become like you. Smashing our faces against rocks so that we are hideous and shrewd and live in the woods like some wild beast!”

Too far—too far. I could see it in the stillness of my younger sister’s body. The shallow, gasping breaths. 

“Tea!” I yelled. I thought of all of us, sitting at our home—in the suburbs, surrounding the Town Fledor—in the rich merchant section. We’d often sit in the back garden on a table the servants had brought for us, sipping tea. The image of that flowery, sunshine place, of my sister’s in their fine dresses and smiles upon their fine lips, made me grin. Ignoring the stillness of the two, I walked forward to grab mint that was dried in the rafts above. “Let’s drink tea!”

With a fist full of mint, I turned my back to them and grabbed the cauldron at put it on the bloodstained table. “Would one of you be so kind as to get me so water to boil?” I asked, not looking back.

I didn’t have to look to see who had grabbed the cauldron and walked outside. I knew. I grabbed the mortar and pestle and ground up the mint leaves into a fine pulp and by the time I was done, Feyre was back. She handed me the freezing, heavy thing and I put it on the hook above the fire. The wood was still good from last night’s burning, so I only had to put a single log on to make the flames go higher.

 _I saw a man come down that lane,_ The silence was so strong, so heavy.  _He looked to me, and he said ‘good day’. We talked for an hour, or maybe two—till he took off his face and said ‘how-do-you-do’. ‘I seemed to have lost my good sense today’, I said, blinking away. ‘For your face has come off in some way’. ‘Oh, you are sane,’ he said with little fain. ‘I put on many, day to day’._ I sang the words softly, filling the silence.

We drank our tea to the sounds of my songs, Nesta holding onto it like a lifeline, humming under her breath but stopping when a dark thought would take her off into her own mind again. I thought she had a rather beautiful voice. Strong and majestic and deep—she never sang though. Not unless we were alone. Never in front of Feyre, who was still and quiet and observant. Even as a child, she never sang. Instead, she’d been the motion of music. The swaying of limbs.

“Is it ready?” I asked when I could think of no more songs to sing. When the tea had gone cold in our chipped mugs.

“It is.” A thoughtful nod.

“Can we go!” I bounced upwards, already out of my chair. The songs came easier, a wordless melody I sang as I ran to the bedroom, to the small dresser next to the large bed. It was our mother’s bed. The bed we’d all been born on. Where mother had died. It was warm and big and comfortable, the sheets and blankets still showing where Nesta had kicked and squirmed in the night to get rid of her nightmares.

I had one beautiful dress. A gift from Feyre—a modest, bright red thing that I knew she’d made herself. Her stitching was on the seams, on the embroidering of the misshaped yellow suns at the bottom. It was still loose even though it was three years old, the sleeves ending just above my elbows and the square neckline showing my collarbone. It swung and swooshed around my legs.

Nesta came in a moment later. She closed the door behind her.

I gave her a bit of sunshine to take away her frown. “Look!” I said, showing her my fine dress. “Wear yours! Oh, I hope that we can do some real shopping. What would you want? I’d like a ribbon for my hair. Or a hat for when I garden.” A big floppy one. I liked those.

“A pink ribbon,” Nesta said, nodding. “Should we put flowers in your hair?”

“Yes please!” I reached inside the drawer that was Nesta’s, pulling out the dress that Feyre had not made, but bought. As if Feyre had known—or maybe feared—that Nesta would not accept something homemade. As if throwing Nesta’s pride in her face. Oh, how they had raged that night, screaming and fighting as Nesta threw the fine gown on the ground and called it cheap, called Feyre a beast with no fashion sense. That night Nesta had cried silently, holding my dress to her chest and running her finger’s over the ugly embroidery.

Both of them were so stubborn.

I huffed as I pulled it out and Nesta took off her sleeping gown. It pooled at her feet, showing the way starvation had ravished her body. I don’t think any of us had had a period for a good year.

I lowered, my skirts spilling out, and opened the dress in front of her. Nesta stepped inside with delicate feet and the fabric slid up her body before she put her arms in the sleeves and turned to let me tie the back lacings. My dress was supposed to be tight on my chest and waist, billowing out at my hips. Nesta’s was tight only on the bust, the sleeves short and bell-shaped and flowed down with silky skirts to the floor. Like my dress, it had not been outgrown. If anything, it was looser on her than ever before.

“There, perfect,” I said, hugging her from behind. “You’re so pretty,” I said, watching her hair catch my sigh. “So womanly.”

“I have smaller breasts than you.” Nesta teased, turning around to poke me.

“Stop!” I laughed. “Breasts do not make a woman!” I put my foot on the edge of my bed, my elbow on my bent knee—my best imitation of our old groundskeeper, who always had wheat in his mouth and a leering smile on his face. “You know what makes a woman?” Nesta’s laugh peeled through the small room as I jerked my eyebrows up and down. “Eh—eh?”

We leaned in together, saying in unison. “What’s between the legs!” 

My older sister’s laughter was like a demand, a thing unchecked that rocked and shook and took no apologies.

Together we walked out into the cottage proper. I sat on the stool by the still raging fire, singing a made up little melody as Nesta’s fingers wove between my hair, combing it, spreading it. Occasionally she’d stop to grab an azalea or some baby’s breath. Flowers—they were important. The smell of them, the delicate nature, the care they took. To live without flowers was to not live at all.

Nesta pinned it all up with our few precious metal pins. “There, beautiful.” She said, hands smooth on my shoulders.

“Your turn!” I jumped up and led her to the stool. Her hair was thick and a little course, but beautiful. Darker than mine, it played off her skin and her always red lips. I wove her hair into one huge braid, loose around the head because tight braids next to her scalp always hurt her. I made a fishtail stream down the middle of her back, loose and looping. I was about to put in flowers when…

Feyre’s hands were still so beautiful. And deft. She’d made a crown of the baby’s breath so fine that when I put it on Nesta’s head, it was a floating wreath of white flowers. With a wink—she was gone, out into the cold to prepare whatever she would need to sell at Town market.

“Thank you,” Nesta said, touching it. She didn’t look at the door. Feyre was gone. Nesta whispered it under her breath.

I found there was nothing to say. So I grabbed the leftover tea—Nesta never finished hers—and gulped the cold minty liquid down before saying, “Hey, Nest.” I whispered to her, wondering if Feyre could hear—her ears so sharp. “Do you know what day it is?” She looked to me, confused. She rarely kept count of the days. “It’s Tithe day!” I whispered, grinning. “The Town will be filled with people. I heard they even hire a troop to play on Tithe day.”

“What.” Her eyes were wide, then shuttered with worry. “Lain—what if?”

“Oh, please,” I said, grabbing her hands. I spun her around and around, giggling I jumped around her. “Never in the history of the world has a Fae decided to take a human from Town Quora.” I giggled at the idea, the ridiculous image of some fine strapping faerie man coming into a muddy and smelly place like Quora.

“They never take the rich or the nobles.” She murmured, not sharing my pleasure. And that would not do. That would not do at all.

“Come now, Nest. A play!” I threw my hands up, still jumping. “We are going to see a play!”

Her laughter was all I needed.

 ---

The Town was about two miles away from our cottage and my feet were aching before I could even see it on the horizon. “Are we there yet?” I gasped. It was hard to breathe. My calves hurt.

“Almost,” Feyre said from behind. We’d all learned from previous Town trips that if Feyre went ahead she’d shove us all into a punishing rhythm that had me nearly faint by the time we got to the Town walls. Her breathing was an even huff, not even having the decency to look mildly strained.

“You said that an hour ago!” Nesta snapped, also gasping breath. She was clutching her thin ribs as they hurt.

I bit my lip, but even Feyre seemed unwilling to bicker now. She kept silent behind us and I turned to see her watching the massive open fields of snow where the farms had taken out trees. The wind seemed to pick up at the tops of the snow and make it dance. She looked… she looked almost peaceful.

My arm strung with Nesta’s, I grinned back at her. “How long, do you think?” I asked, huffing at the slow incline.

“’Bout twenty minutes.” She shrugged under her great, heavy clothes. I could see her legs peeking out as they parted her cloak. Pants. She always wore men’s pants these days.

“Augh!” Nesta groaned. “I fucking hate this.”

I laughed, filling our time with a breathless song that ached and burned as the cold seeped into my lungs.

It became obvious when we got close to the Town. Quora was rather moderately sized with large tree trunks banded together to make a protective wall. Inside the mud was so bad from traveling that the only way to walk without ruining skirts or boots was on the wooden planks that were set from doorstep onward. It had made me laugh the first time I’d seen it, all those people walking single file on wooden beams. Only the market had walkways large enough for people to shuffle and walk side by side.

I’d only been a few times over the years, whenever Feyre had stored enough hides and skins and meat to sell for a decent enough price. I suspected she went far more often than we did, from the small, precious gifts she’d given us over the years; food and clothes and boots and silly things like paints and books and a tiny music box. She knew the stores, the sellers, the proper asking prices for goods. She was nowhere near as good as father or Nesta when it came to bargaining, but she always seemed to walk away satisfied. Something about ‘terrifying the shit outta people’ gave her the opportunity to always get a good price. Mostly, though, it seemed our younger sister knew the dark and shady places of the Town. She’d disappear for a few hours as she told us to mind our bodies. She’d always come back reeking of Tabaco and opiates after, her eyes clear and cold and cutting as she hissed that we needed to go—right then and there.

There would be no back-alley trades now though. No drug dens. No scary deals. It was Tithe day.

Mother used to throw her best parties on Tithe day. I could remember the fine dresses; the way people would dance and drink and all day and all night. There had been fireworks and streamers and music and plays. Feyre would dance and I would sing and Nesta would mingle with the adults, copying mother’s desires for political contacts and trade partners for father’s business. It wasn’t until I was 10 that Mother told me why the third week of December was so special. “We celebrate,” Mother had said, “Because we can. Because it’s what humanity does best when darkness encroaches and the greater good is being done.” Because Tithe was the day a human was taken—spirited away to a magical world that did not follow the same rules than humans did.

I used to imagine it as a child, as one would imagine their wedding day. Of a strong and beautiful golden Elven Fae coming to me, smiling at me, asking me to take his hand and to take me off to places too wonderful to imagine. Where Mother’s parties would always be in full swing and the people were kind.

The Town was roaring with that spirit, with the desire to ease an otherwise somber day. Music of all different kinds—piano, harp, violins, bagpipes, singing—all vying for attention so it was a muddled and echoing dissonance in the wind. I could hear jugglers and speeches and drunk people. Banners flapped on the tree logs and from every window, every door, there hung precious and bright strips of cloth that fluttered in the cold wind and falling snow. Hot breath mingled in the air and almost everyone had a bottle of booze in their hands.

“I want to go to the play!” I said, tugging Nesta’s arm.

“Let’s get food!” Nesta said. From the line waiting to get into the Town through the gates, I couldn’t smell food—but I could fantasize about it. What the smell of spice and herbs and dripping fat would be like cutting through the mud and perfume and body odor and bad breath and the smell of sewage. I could feel my mouth filling with saliva at the very thought.

We got into line behind a waiting cart. I could see an old man and girl sitting on the bench at the front, hot breath leaving the lips of their hoods as they waited. There were only about three or four people waiting before them, talking to a group of guards who were taking down names and information and goods to sell.

“Turkey! I haven’t had roasted turkey in forever.” I moaned, rubbing my now aching belly. Hunger was funny like that. You could live with it constantly there and it wasn’t painful until food was mentioned.

“Hot soup that isn’t boiled potatoes,” Nesta said, the hunger in her eyes, too. “Something with cream in it.”

“Do you remember what sweets tasted like?” I asked her.

“No!”

For some reason the idea of it—of not remembering what sugar felt like on the tongue—was hilarious. We grabbed onto each other as we shook as if the only thing keeping us from floating up into the sky was each other.

I didn’t notice the woman until Feyre, behind us, hissed. The sound was so sharp and strange in my laughter that I abruptly stopped, wiping the tear off my cheek to follow her sharp gray gaze to… To a woman dressed all in white, moving down the line.

She was talking to the man and girl in the cart in front of us; a beautiful woman who had shaved off all her hair and was standing, sun-kissed skin shining, in a beautiful white robe. The smile on her face never wavered, even as the man spat on her cheek and threatened her with his donkey whip if she didn’t get out of his face right then and there.

She moved on quickly, her eyes tight, the smile bright on her face. She looked at us and walked forward on the muddy ground, her boots the only thing soiled about her. She stopped a few feet away, clasping her hands before her, smiling. “Hello, do you have a moment to talk about the Word?” She asked. She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Today is a Holy day, one filled with magic and wonder as our Gods grace the soil and air with Their presence to descend amongst us humans and see who is worthy to be in Their lands.” Her eyes traveled between me and Nesta, then stopping short as she noticed something behind us. Feyre, probably, if the expression on her face was anything to go by.

“Oh my!” Her hand was at her graceful and delicate throat in a minute, fingers moving nervously to play with the clasp of her cloak. “If anyone is needing the Light and Word of the Gods, it would be you, strange one.”

Feyre made a rude, vulgar noise in the back of her throat. I blushed, turning to look at my younger sister and beg her with my eyes not to start anything.

The Children of the Word were a harmless religion, one that been brought up after the war and chaos of the Separations between worlds. They viewed the Fae as Gods, as Immortal Rulers who had grown displeased with mankind and had decided to cast us from their Favored Land and shun us. To them, the Tithe was a Holy Day where worthy were allowed back into the Land of Plenty. I rather liked the religion. It had seemed peaceful and serene to me—one all about exemplifying purity and giving yourself good manners and grace to be accepted by the gentle Fae.

I used to read from their Holy Book. Nesta had caught me one day, tearing it from my hands one day. “You know,” She’d said, looking at me from beneath her lashes, holding the book. “These people put so much time and effort into being worthy for their Gods—yet none of them, not one, has ever speaks about enslavement.”

She’d handed it back and I hadn’t let her see me reading it again. In the move to the cottage the Holy Book had been left behind, but I still believed. Still enjoyed the prayers and sermons that the Children of the Word, their message of peace and serenity.  I didn’t so much look at them as the people who worshiped our ancient oppressors so much as people who wanted a kinder, simpler life. I didn’t like the hate they received for their belief.

Nesta’s arm tightened on mine.

“What do you know of the Fae?” Feyre asked, voice bored.

I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the bald acolyte’s smile crumble. “I know of Their beauty and Their magic, how Their lands flow with plenty and h—”

“Have you met one?” Feyre corrected.

“N-No.” I opened my eyes to see the woman, her hand still on her throat, trying and failing to look away from my sister’s face. “I have not—”

“Then don’t speak to us as if you know a damn thing.” Nesta hissed. Her own revulsion to the acolyte clear as day on her face. An easy dismissal. I tried to convey to the woman that she should be happy with that and go on to the people behind us.

The woman, though, seemed offended. “I—”

“What?” Nesta snapped. “You feel like arguing your point? Go tell your worship to some other fool.”

The woman, seeing that we could not be converted, left. She gave us a wide berth and talked to the people behind us—two farmer’s wives, arm in arm—who took her words with grace and listened to her preaching. I tried to strain my ears to listen too, but we were moved quickly forward as the guards let people in.

The old man and his daughter were let in quickly, apparently well known by the guards of the Town. There were two of them there, sitting on a tiny bench where the tree-wall dipped and a tiny sort of opened roofed antechamber was erected by the guard-room. When there wasn’t a Town celebration going on, the two gates were closed and only by talking to the guards through the first gate could a person enter the Town proper.

One had scars on his face and another had stains on his fine pressed blue uniform. They both had swords on their hips and hard eyes to gaze at things. As we walked forward into the small, open antechamber between gates, the one with the scars slapped the dirty-uniformed one across the chest, tilting his chin at us.

Shy, I let Nesta’s arm sweep me back so she stood between me and the two guards.

“Well well, come to bring two beautiful virgins to sacrifice, Feyre?” One of them—the one with the most salt and pepper in his hair, with the dirty uniform—asked. He laughed, loud and joyful.

“Oh, no. I figured I’d given them a bit of fun. The sacrifice is at midnight.” She laughed. “You gunna make us wait out here in the pissing cold?”

“We got to.” The other said, smiling. “Might as well you, too, eh?”

“You coming tomorrow for open training day?” The older one asked.

“Aye. Maybe. Depends.” Feyre shrugged.

“So cold.” The scar one teased. “Who ye be?” He asked, turning kind eyes on me and my older sister.

“Neh-stah and E-lane.” Feyre said, pronouncing the words slowly as she came by to lean against the wooden beams that protected the city.

“Beautiful names for beautiful girls.” The old one said, chuckling. He was writing it down into his huge book, propped up on a dais.

“Careful, old man. What will your wife say if she heard you flirting?” Feyre drawled. She seemed at ease with these men, familiar. I wondered how she knew them and what their open training day was like. Was my sister learning how to fight? Was her dream to be a guard for a city? A soldier? I looked down, where her heavy cloak hid her male-pants.

“Oh, I’ll just tell her you cursed me into it.” He replied.

“Piss off.”

I was about to open my mouth to speak, but Nesta stopped me with a glance. Her mistrustful eyes fell back to the soldiers.

“All-right.” The younger one said cheerfully. “What’re you peddling this time?”

“Get another wolf cloak?” The scared one asked, eager.

Wolf cloak? I turned to see Feyre, who was smiling as much as she could with her twisted and deformed face. “No—three deer pelts and some meat.”

“Shame.” They marked it down in a book. “Off with you, beast!” He said, laughing. He shooed us with his hands while the other one made the sign to ward off evil, kissing his three fingers and then flipping them up to his forehead.

“Bastards,” Feyre muttered, but again, there was that twisted smile. She ushered us beyond the open inner gate and crowded us towards the wall so that we could talk without getting in anyone’s way. She never tried to touch us anymore, had even exiled herself from the bedroom after angering Nesta and being spat on for her smell—like animals and wild breath and hot fur. It was so very rare for her to reach out with her hands. She didn’t do it now as she corralled us away from the gates. “You know the rules. Stick together. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t talk to strange men. Keep your head down. Keep your money safe and if someone knocks into you, you make sure you still have it. Don’t get conned—”

“Yes. Yes.” Nesta said, testy. Her hunger was in her eyes.

“And if you see a Fae,” Feyre said, her voice a low, furious growl. “You fucking turn and walk away.” She kept her gaze steady, forcing us to nod under the threat of her cold violence.

“Didn’t you talk to a Fae, though?” I asked. “I know that you teased that acolyte about it before—but you have talked to a Fae.”

My little sister rarely ever looked startled. Maybe it was her face, maybe the scars and broken bones couldn’t let her make a startled expression—but it showed, sometimes, in the way she blinked. She did that now. “You talk in your sleep.” I teased.

“Keeps us up the entire fucking night,” Nesta grumbled. As if she didn’t creep out of bed and listen at the cracked door just to hear Feyre’s murmured speech.

“I…”

“What was it like?” I pressed, moving closer to her. No way would a Fae come here for Tithing—it was so safe it was boring. But the idea of meeting some strong, beautiful Fae. “Who is Rh—”

“Don’t say the name!” Her anger was like a dagger that sliced through the skin, giving pain long after it was gone. She crowded into my face, the mint she chewed to keep her breath fresh ghosting on my skin and making my cold cheeks burn. “Don’t. What you hear come from my mouth while I sleep is my business, Elain. Not yours. Do not speak his name.”

“Him, then,” I said, smiling.

“Stop fucking pushing her!” Nesta shouted, shoving Feyre away from me. “You dumb fucking brute.” Nesta hissed.

“Not a fucking word.” She said, pointing at us, startled enough that she couldn’t even use her clever tongue. She stalked off into the crowds, her hood thrown over her head. In seconds, she was gone.

“As if we would tell,” Nesta muttered. “I mean, she was probably dreaming and didn’t want to admit it. As if a Fae would be here outside of Tithe.” A pause. “Did you see her reaction? Fuck.” Nesta grumbled, then shot a scathing glare at an old, plump woman who waddled by, muttering about the profanities of the youth.

“Come on.” I pleaded, grabbing my sister’s cold, gloved hand. “Let’s go get some food!”

Too late, we realized that Feyre had stormed off with all the money. We stood on a plank, mouths watering as the steam rose from some kind of meat—lamb, they said—that was dripping hot fat on burning coals. Eventually, though, we had to move for the paying customers, both of us silent as we wandered through music and puppet shows and fire-breathers and acrobats. We found the troop on a wooden stage, a loud and screaming crowd watching what looked like _The Lord’s Daughter_ reenacted by men in bright clothing and makeup. It was different from Baba Yaga’s dark stories in the night. Here, people screamed and booed and threw things when the bad guy did something. They yelled and cheered and clapped when something funny happened. And never, ever was there a bad ending in sight.

It used to be that troopers would come to the estate to entertain us. Mother had been a fan of the arts and often endorsed them. Everything from artists to musicians to actors to dancers, she’d been inspired by them, enjoying their talents and the feel to the air they brought with them on swift, beautiful winds. She’d encouraged talent in all of us, too. Had put me in singing classes before I could speak full sentences. Feyre had grown up in pointe shoes. Mother had tried getting Nesta into art, into music, into singing, acting—anything. But Nesta was no artist. After demanding that she stop with the “frivolous nonsense of mummers and whores”—Mother had instead invested Nesta into the art of being a lady; governesses and grammar school and political classes and event organizing. That was Nesta’s art. If fit her soul of fire and temperament and control well.

She’s a Queen, our mother used to say. A Queen that will reign supreme, one day.

Nesta, hungry, grabbed at my hand and we watched on the sidelines as the actors gave _The Lord’s Daughter_ life and movement and color. Mother would have loved them.

As the second act was about to play, a shadow loomed over the bright sky. The snow drifted in heavier waves, soaking into the cloak. My feet ached. I didn’t resist as Nesta led me across the boards toward an awning with a small fire pit underneath, where we could warm our hands and our faces and wait out the cold.

“I’m hungry.” Nesta moaned.

“I am, too.” I murmured. I had skipped breakfast in the hope that I could gorge myself on the food here. I opened my mouth to say we should look for Feyre when—

Light. Beauty. A shocking amount of knee-trembling fear.

There, across the boardwalk, strutting through the mud as if it did not matter that his shining black boots got dirty with muck that wasn’t just mud—was a man. Not a man? Maybe a man. He was prettier than any man I’d ever seen before in my life. Prettier than Mother had been, even with all her makeup and wigs and fine clothing. Maybe because his prettiness did not come from what he was wearing, though he was wearing fine clothing, but from… himself. No alterations were necessary to make him better than he was. As if he could get any better.

Eyes like two burning green stones under perfect golden eyebrows. The barest hints of freckles to dust across an aquiline nose. A mouth that was masculine, expressive. A figure that was all strength, tall and lean, and… beautiful pointed ears peeking out from shoulder length gold hair that was just barely lighter than his skin tone. He was simply— “Perfect.”

Nesta did something, I could see her moving from the corner of my gaze—before she was grabbing me and trying to haul me away. I refused though, shoving her off, looking over her to see him striding through the mud, blinding green eyes looking this way and that. “Elain! Elain!” Nesta hissed. “Come on—we can’t be here.”

“He’s so beautiful, Nest.” I murmured. When his eyes caught the light, they literally glowed.

“I don’t care!” Nesta hissed. “We need to go.” She was muttering something under her breath, pushing me backward.

I watched as he moved through the mud, eyes shifting, no cloak on him whatsoever. Steam roamed off his skin instead, entering the air with gentle wisps and clouds. He looked strong, kindly, masculine. Unlike any man I’d ever seen before in my life. As if he was born under the idea of man, rather than man himself. There was nothing about him that was not perfect, and it made him stand out, glow, become a being that turned the Town Quora into a shabby, backward, broken place of shallow dreamers and emancipated bodies.

Self-conscious, I let Nesta draw me back and into an alley. What would a being like that do, if he saw me? My cheeks were hollow and I had terrible bags under my eyes. My hair wasn’t shiny. Suddenly the flowers in it felt like silly weeds and my finest dress felt like a farce, a painted sack with ugly little suns on them.

“I can’t believe a Fae is here.” Nesta hissed, covering me with her body as she stood in the alley, casting nervous glances over her shoulder as the Elven Fae came and passed us, searching.

“I can’t either.” I murmured. So beautiful, so devastating.

As if he could hear it, his traveling eyes flickered over before looking away. The glowed in the dim sun. Literally glowed. Children—sad, silly children with holes in their worn clothing and stains upon their painted faces—ran past him, unaware of the majesty of the man they played around. One of the children, probably no older than five, kicked up his feet as he yelled, “Give it back! Give it back!” making mud spray everywhere. Some of it splashed on the pristine brown of the man’s pants, darkening the rich fabric, muddying it with the grossness that not even humans would walk in. But that Elven Man only smiled, his eyes crinkling as he watched them pass by, unaware of his ruined clothes. Little webs formed in the corner of his eyes that slid down and cross his cheekbones, as if expression that his eyes were the sun themselves, rays of light leaking.

The children passed. The man mused after them, still smiling, before his long legs led him past the alley Nesta had us hiding in.

Even in my daydreams, I had never imagined someone so… perfect. So glowing. Suddenly my childish little dream of being picked up in the Tithe seemed foolish. Me? Picked? No. Never. Never in a million years.

“What—Lain?” Nesta asked, crowding closer. “Why are you crying?”

“He—He’s so beautiful!” I wailed, holding myself to keep in my trembling.

“Shit—c’mon, Lain. C’mon. Let’s… uh, let’s go find Feyre. Yeah?” She led me gently through the alley. Slowly, ignoring the planks so we could keep to the shadows of the alley, walking among the muck as the Elven Fae had. We made our way to the market to look for our younger sister. We found her easily—even with her hood up, she was a distinctive figure. She was talking to a group of guards, telling them something that made them all laugh.

We inched closer. Eventually, we could hear them. “And I said—‘what? Have you never heard of a prick before’?” More roaring men’s laughter. I couldn’t help the urge to shy from it.

“Speaking of—we got one of them uppities in here.” A leaner, younger man said.

“What?”

“One of them Elven or what have you. Calls himself Lord, nuffin else.” Another guard said. “Prettier than any woman, that.”

“What’s he look like?” Feyre asked, voice deceptively casual.

“Tall, thin. Gold hair. Green eyes. Weirdly golden skin. Face like you wouldn’t believe, I’m telling ya.”

“I think I got my prick up for ‘im.”

Laughter. “You get your prick up fur anyfing with eyes, you do.”

“T’s true. But a big throbin’ one for that Lord.”

Feyre turned without a word. She headed away from us, ignoring the calls of the men who asked after her, telling her not to be sour because it didn’t matter that “Lil Riffie don’t get it up for you!”—Nesta’s hand tightened on mine as she rushed past the clump of guards to go grab her, our boots thunderous on the planks.

“No runnin’!” One of the guards shouted as we passed. There were more jokes about ‘getting it up’ as Nesta flipped them off.

We slowed, if only a bit. “Shit, we’re going to lose her.” Nesta hissed.

I took a deep breath, ignoring the ache in my chest that hadn’t gone away since seeing the Eleven Fae. “Feyre!” I yelled, voice high over the crowd. “Feyre”

Feyre turned, she saw us, she rushed over.

But it was too late. She was too late because suddenly a heat was at my back like sunshine and summer had come to greet me in the cold winter air. I turned, already knowing what I would see, but was still flabbergasted at the sight of the beautiful Elven Fae man standing there. His eyes were on me, bright and green with flecks of immeasurable gold shining inside.   

I have never painted a day in my life. Was never good at it. But seeing him, steaming and beautiful and perfect behind me—I would have given anything to be able to paint him the way I saw him. My heart—horrible and squeezing—seemed to agree.

“Hello, beautiful.” The Fae’s voice was sweet and lilting and—oh, he would sound so good singing. Deeper than my voice, but we would be like two sparrows together, our voices carrying on warm winds.

 He considered me with bright eyes and I could feel my heart swelling as he took me in. It felt like my stomach dropped, twirling, twisting, as his beautiful eyes traveled to Nesta to appraise her, too. Heart swelling, mind shaking, as he turned his attention back to me.

“What is your name, little one?”

“What’s Vorta name got anything ta’ do wif’ ya?” A cold, undaunted voice said.

I turned, my cheeks burning a furious heat now as I realized my youngest sister had the nerve to talk to a Fae Lord with such disrespect. I glared at her, saying in my best singing voice, “Feyre, don’t be rude!”

Her sharp eyes looked at me, pinning me to the spot with something almost like loathing there, in the dark, slate-grey orbs. She was standing there, her cloak’s hood back, her bald head drenched in snow and water that ran down the ruined folds of her face in rivets. She cast cold eyes at me, and then did something very, very strange. Something that I have never seen any of my sister’s do before. She bowed… looking supplicant. Her neck was tilted to the side, her hands rubbing themselves as she nearly prostrated herself on the muddy walkway. Like she was groveling.

“Feyre?” I asked, confused.

“She my charge, she is,” Feyre said as she rose, coming to step just beside me. “As is ta bitch of ta ot’er.”

“Why are you speaking li—” Nesta stood closer, shutting me up by grabbing my arm.

I turned back to the Elven Fae whose face was a careful expression set on absolutely perfect features. There was no flaw to him whatsoever. Ever feature of his was perfectly balanced against each other, every pigment of him brighter than the world around him. I could see how he was trying not to let Feyre unsettle him, though. I wished she would go away. “And you are…” He asked.

“We be Children of ta Word, sirey.” A deep, honorific bow. In a motion like that, I remembered that my sister was a dancer. That there was grace to her. “We be of ‘n old reli-tion, one o’ most devout to Your magnificienceses.” She spoke like a Quora native—like the guards she’d been talking to.

I frowned. I had never been religious, never been baptized. Neither had my Mother, as far as I knew, or Father, or Nesta. Only Feyre was truly religious and only to the one she called Mother Nature—who she blessed by cursing and blaming constantly. She didn’t have the blind hatred Nesta did for the Children but… I didn’t understand what was happening. I was about to ask her when Nesta’s elbow dug into my side so hard I gasped.

The Elven Lord stepped forward, his eyes never leaving Feyre’s bowed and hunched over form. The heat that came off him was lovely. And it smelled good—like lilacs and open breeze. His expressive mouth was frowning. “Are you okay, Priestess?” I somehow knew he was talking to me, even though his eyes never once moved from my bowed sister.

I was about to answer that I was no acolyte when Feyre answered instead. “She is new, she is. N’ untreed. She lived in temples entire life, ‘n sights or sounds graced them ears, no. Charmed, beau-te-ful soul she has, of naiv-et-tey.” Another deep bow. “My sadness, sirey. We shoulda be on ta way, we should.”

“No. I don’t think you should.” The man nearly sang as he spoke, his voice was so wonderful.

“Naw?” Feyre’s voice was a cold challenge.

“No?” I echoed, hope blossoming in my chest, nearly cleaving my heart in two as it tried to leap out at him. Have it! I nearly cried. Have my heart! Have my soul! My body is yours!

“No. I have come for Tithe and I have decided on which human I think would best be at home in my Court.” His eyes were on me, warming me like the kiss of summer on the skin. “Dear Priestess, Vorta…” He held out his hand. “Come to me.”

“I—I—“ I wanted to. I wanted so much to grasp his long-fingered hand and join him in wherever he wanted me to be. As long as I was by him. As long as I was always with him.

“O course, sire-y.” Feyre said, stepping forward. Both of us ignored Nesta’s hiss. She was nothing but furious tension next to me, her figure shaking with her repressed emotions. “There be the customs ta follow.”

His mouth grew impatient. “All things that she can practice while in Prythian.” Such an odd word. It sounded lilting on his tongue.

“O course, o course.” I had never seen Feyre grovel before, much less with such… conviction. “There be ta matter of her own person faith. As ‘er keep-er, I’m ta remind ‘er o such tings—”

“You cannot come.” The Elven Fae said, voice… disgusted.

I had, of course, heard all there was to be said about my sister. I had seen people shy from her, fear her, call her names, cast her out. Most recently I have seen them joke with her, laugh with her, tease her. But for some reason, I did not expect such animosity from such a perfect, wonderful being. I frowned at him—and he noticed my frown. His eyes darted to me, then back to Feyre. “I am sorry. There are rules to the Tithe. I can bring only one mortal.”

Another deep bow. “Ye. But if ya take ‘er will ye respect ‘er spirituality?”

“Of course.” He rolled his shoulders back, his hand still in the air like a silent request for me to grasp it. My heart still beat wildly, my mind racing, confused at the what Feyre was doing.

“She can’t be touched fur a month,” Feyre said, rapidly. “Naw malen ‘ands touch ‘er unless she give ‘em permission to do. Ye presence, ye must let her be free. Sun and night kiss ‘er beau-te-ful face to grace ‘er. No trappins, naw matter how prett-e they be. Bathe and time fur prayer, she needs.”

The Elven Lord looked at me. I wished I could tell him that he could touch me all he wanted, that he could have me by his side day and night and that the only thing that would give me what I needed is the heat of his body and the beauty of him. He could do whatever he wanted to me. Whatever I wanted to do to him. I wondered what that hand would feel like roaming my skin. What his lilting tongue would feel like in places I had never been touched before. Warm, I bet.

“If it does not happen,” Nesta said, “I am afraid that, under our spirituality, she will be considered unpure and unworthy of Your greatness. Mentally she will grow dark and burdened. It is… a heavy burden, Your Greatness, to feel the faith slip away because of untoward actions. This pathetic servant you see, it was by her unpureness that she supplicate and striked rocks across her face so that she could again feel the love and light of her faith.”

Feyre gave another deep bow.

I looked at her, frowning. Looked at Nesta, too.

Nesta was shaking. Her eyes seemed to plead with me.

“Th—that’s right. I must feed my soul.” I said.

“Without it, her beauty will wither and die.” Feyre echoed a cruel hissed, loosing her fake accent.

“All right.” He nodded, he kept his hand out for me, open and waiting. “Vorta, would you like to come with me?”

I would. I would. Eyes wide, I nodded. I could hear the music in his voice. The laughter and songs and dancing. I bit my lip as I peeked up at him, shy. “My name is Elain.”

Feyre sighed as the Elven Fae’s shining eyes narrowed. “Okay, sweet mortal. Elain—” It felt like a vice had wrapped around my rapidly beating heart. As if there was something tied around me, dragging me, gliding me—“Come here”. To him. I would go to him.

I moved forward to grab his hand. But Nesta was there, blocking his body from mine. “No.” She moaned. “No—Feyre, do something—Do something.”

My heart was beating so fast and wild in my chest. I needed to go to him. I had to. I pushed at Nesta.

“Feyre!”

I was ripped from my sister—or rather my sister was ripped from me as Feyre pried her away, then held her by the stomach as Nesta kicked and screamed, tears rolling down her face. “Do something! Do something!” She wailed.

I paused, but that band of tightness on my chest led me forward—on and on forever forward.

The Elven Lord was somehow even better up close. Not a pore in sight. Not a flaw on his skin. His eyes were so, so bright. I grabbed his hand as I got close enough. My fingertips touched his smooth ones, then I glided my hand into his, shivering at the sensation of his skin and heat as I traced my fingers down, down, across his palm… his fingers rose to grab my hand in the gentlest of grips as he considered me—then a blinding, white light, so bright yet so gentle, wrapped around me and I left with the Elven Fae Lord.


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feyre POV

I was helpless. I’d never been helpless like this in a while. Not since Mother had died. Father’s death had been simple—his soul, his mind, his joy for life had ended the second he’d lost his money, his family’s fortune… his body going too hadn’t meant much of anything. I’d already dug the grave for him by the time Elain’s tears had dried. I never had the heart to tell my sweet sister that her garden grew so well because of the decomposition of his body.

When mother had died, though… it had been hard. Devastating. I’d felt so numb, so empty that it was like I’d died with her for a while, too. Like Father and I had just slipped off to watch her soul drift away, leaving the living with only memories…

I felt that now, holding Nesta’s too thin body to me. She struggled hard—she kicked, she hit my head and she bit at my hands—but I didn’t let go. Didn’t release even a little bit as I squeezing her to me.

It was a known rule. You stop a Fae from taking who they chose during the Tithe, your life was forfeit. And I wasn’t about to lose two sisters at once.

 _Fuck you, Mother Nature. Fuck you so fucking much—for choosing_ her _._

I watched Elain walk forward. Her eyes—so beautiful, so wide, so brown, so warm—were blank and misted over, as if she wasn’t really there. As if it wasn’t her, placing her blemished and callused hand in the Elven Fae’s.

I wondered, briefly, as Nesta’ bit my shoulder to make me let go, what the two of them saw when they looked at the Elven Fae. Drik had mentioned something about beauty—but I could see no beauty. All I could see was a being of pure light; it was a sharp and concentrated white where the heart should be, glowing golden in the shape of lean and long limbs. Even the hair was concentrated light, shining and flowing straight down to the shoulders like a river of pure orange-gold. The eyes were the only thing that differed in the incorporeal body, they were two glowing green orbs; shining like sunlight through leaves to tint the golden light around it and then just add the majesty of pure energy. He was so bright, so insubstantial that where his light peaked out from his skin the world grew brighter.

So when Elains’s face looked up into his, when her hand was placed in the proportions of light that looked almost like a hand…she glowed. Bright. Beautiful. Angelic. Reflecting him as if she were the moon itself.

“Mother above, Mother below,” I whispered under Nesta’s terrible, throat-wrenching screams. “Have her not know suffering.” It was the only thing I could do, now. Helpless, all I could say was a real prayer.

Appealing to his vanity so she wouldn’t be harmed wouldn’t work now. Elain had forgotten the power of names—she’d given hers to him… now he owned her. Body, soul, mind. The only thing I could do was hope that her mind was spared from whatever she’d endure. That she saw the world as something beautiful and kind till the very end.

They were gone in a flash of light.

* * *

 

“How could you!” Nesta screamed. She pushed at me. Shoved at me. Hit me. Kicked me. Screamed and tried to bite me again. Like a rabid animal, she got into my face and tried everything in her emaciated power to knock me down and hurt me. I let her, knowing she needed it. Knowing I needed it, too. She would always be the punisher to my victim—always. It was a role we’d played as children. “How could you, you dumb brute! She’s gone! She’s gone! What did you even do, hu? Why didn’t you stop him—”

It had been going on for near ten minutes now and her voice was getting hoarse and her punches were more like gentle slaps. She’d resorted to kicking me in the shin the same place over and over and over again until I knew there would be a hellish bruise and welt there as the day went on. People were giving us all a very wide berth, creating a loose circle a safe distance away from my horror and Nesta’s fury so that they could gawk and cheer. Beyond them, word had gotten out that someone had been chosen for Tithe. Not just in any Town but in Town Quora. The cheer and music and celebration that had always seemed forced and macabre too me, now turned into true jubilation. Not only had they survived without the loss of a loved one or friend, but they’d managed it in their very home Town. They were blessed—they were. As if they’d faced something terrible head on and had come out the victors.

 _I hate you, Mother Nature. I hate you so much_.

I also really, really hated the Tithe.

Over Nesta’s raging frame I looked to see Dirk and Pete and Cli stepping up to the rim of the circle, looking to me and then to Nesta. I gave them a short head shake and instead of coming forward they tried to move the circle away—giving us a kind of space regardless of how far a peasant can gawk. I wished I could show them my thanks. I knew, though, that I couldn’t.

The second he’d chosen her, my days had become numbered. I’d go and I’d save her—and die in the futile process.

“—you’re nothing but a dumb slut!” Nesta hissed, right into my face, blocking my view of them and the others. Her words got my attention, something cold and hard settling in me. For some reason, it was her favorite insult; commenting about my purity, my experience with men. Sure, I enjoyed my own digging on her lack of experience… but she had been there in the end. She had walked into the barn and had called my name and had screamed when she saw me. She had held my broken hand in her own and asked what had happened, though she knew. She knew. And yet she threw it in my face now, screaming and hateful. Just like a rabid animal looking to hurt where she knew it would hurt most. “A stupid bitch who goes around killing and fucking and—” And enough.

I slapped her across the face. It stung my hand in a sharp bite, despite the gloves, despite the worn and callused nature of my hand. I didn’t even want to imagine what it did to Nesta as she was thrown to the market platform, sprawled and dazed and cupping her cheek. “Ah—” Nesta gasped. Like breathe being exhaled. Like an accusation. “Ah—Ah.” She did not cry. I watched, a little amazed, as she stood up at her full height, rolled her shoulder back, and looked down her nose at me. The right side of her face was a horrible splotchy blood color the general shape of my hand. And yet… she looked every ounce a queen. Every inch of her a vengeful sister. Composed. To be feared. Her voice was simmering haughty rage as she said, “Never do that to me again.”

“You were out of control,” I said, knowing that would bring her anger up again. Fury danced in her eyes, but she did control it.

“Fuck you.” She sneered. I realized at the last second, she wasn’t saying it to me, but a man in half-decent clothes who had come forward to see if she was okay. He backed up at the sight of her glare. “Get the fuck away from me!” She hissed.

The man turned and left.

Her sharp, hateful eyes turned back to me. Odd, that she could hate me with so much passion, but she had an even deeper well of it for anyone she did not know. She looked at me with a look I’d known in childhood: one that said that I’d be drugged in supper’s wine and wake up with no eyebrows. Or all my dolls would be mysteriously burned to porcelain ash.

“Well?” She asked. “What’s your plan?”

I snorted. I knew if I gave her any kind of praise for how quickly and how gracefully she pulled herself together—I’d meet only her ire. All I could say then, was, “Follow me.”

I did not wait. I never waited. If I could do a thing, I would. If I couldn’t do a thing for my sister, I would do it anyway. No hesitation. No second guessing. That was the law of survival.

 

* * *

 

I went shopping. The cured meat and hides gave me a good enough price that, before everything had gone to shit, I could have paid for the rest of winter. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for anything extravagant, but enough to keep us alive. Now that the ‘keeping us alive’ had changed, the budget had to. I’d have to stretch out our money. I bought boots of fine, supple leather I never would have been able to buy before, real socks, some more hook and thread, and a better cloak. Nesta followed me through all of it, silent as I bought one expensive thing after another, not even commenting on the amount of money I had in the purse. She was distant through it all, a spectator.

 _I can’t do much_. I thought, as I paid for the cloak. It had a lot of nice pockets inside of it and was the kind of warm that worked with body heat, instead of layers. It would be easy to roll up into my pack.  _I don’t know how to save Elain. I don’t know what to do—what Prythia is even like. Hell, I’ve only ever seen two damn faeries in my entire life and both of them could cook me up for dinner if they wanted to…_

And that was it. That was explaining the boiling rage sitting in my gut. The pure  _power_  of the fae. There was nothing I could do against them. No conceivable way I could fight back. Even if I did get Elain back… what would I do?

I put the new cloak on as I turned to Nesta, who didn’t say a thing as I handed her three gold marks. “Iodine,” I told her. “As much as this will buy.” I pointed her in the general direction of the apothecary. “Meet me back here in thirty.” She went without a sneer as I demanded her to run my errand.

 

I waited until she’d disappeared into the crowd before walking the opposite way. I kept walking till the buildings of the dropped away to a small ledge of sharp rocks and dirt and gravel that was the only warning to the sharp drop of the plateau the Town sat on. It was to defend the Town from two sides, I knew. So there was no way to be attacked from the East or South. The guards all collecting to the edges, where the gentle slope of earth rose to tied wooden stakes that walled the city.

It was a mistake, I’d once told Lorlen, the Captain of the guard. If I was going to attack the city for whatever reason, I’d climb up the cliff face with a small unit. Break in where there wasn’t even a wall with a tiny unit that could attack form the inside while the guard occupied themselves with the larger, more visible unit. He’d listened, I think, because I could see the buildings of a small wooden guard toward far away to the South.

I sat on a sharp rock, feeling the snow and coldness of the stone seep through my new, fine cloak. I watched the open view of the forest, of the snowy planes. The sky was nothing but a bright, violet-white thing. The sun reflected off all the untouched snow, making it blindingly bright.

Sitting there, wrapping my arms around my legs… I heard none of the city at my back. The collection of buildings behind me were all residential. Nothing stirred but the wind. I felt very, very alone. And with that feeling, I finally found that I could cry. Just like when I walked into the forest and touched earth that only saw the life of animals and bugs—I cried.

I had to make a plan. Something to hold onto as I went to the faerie world. I wasn’t very optimistic that a plan would come, though. Or that the plan would matter much.

I knew a story that went a lot like this. Of a brother who realized his sister had been taken by the Fae and he decided to go save her. He tricked a Fae into taking him, and vain and proud, the Fae did. The man gutted the Fae before the magical world realized that he didn’t belong, and he put on the Fae’s skin so he could stay. He saved a homeless man who ended up being a powerful warlock. He tamed a horse that could run on air. He had a faerie woman fall in love with him so he could steal her amulet of pure lightning. Using the warlock’s directions, he climbed the sky to the a castle in the clouds with his horse and used lightning to kill the Fae that had taken his sister. But she couldn’t go with him. The magical world had taken the woman for its own. He stayed there, in his borrowed skin, for the nine months it took her to conceive her child. And, kicking and screaming, not even getting to hold her baby… the man took off his borrowed skin and they vanished to the human land. She killed herself the next day. And the fae-baby, half human, came calling twenty years later to figure out what had happened to his mother. He met his uncle, the man who had killed his parents, and was slaughtered, too. And the Purge began. Any person suspected of having even a small ounce of Fae blood in them was whipped off the face of the now only human world…

I knew another story a lot like this. Of a brother who realized his sister had been taken by the Fae and replaced with a changeling, he decided to saver her. He used the changeling to find his sister in a Court with an evil Queen. She taunted the brother for his love, saying that if he completed three of her tasks, he would let her go. He had to a find a warlock and tease his secrets. He found the warlock by accident. He had to tame a horse that could fly. He fell on the horse and because of the warlock’s curse, couldn’t let go until the horse gave up and was tamed. He had to make the Queen herself fall in love with him—and proof of that love would be the relinquishing of her necklace…and he stole the skin of her King. Wore it and idly asked if she would let him see her lightening necklace for a second, to see if the power of it needed to be replenished in the next storm. Loving her King, she gave it over without a thought. And he won the three trials. He took his sister back home. They had a full hour together, exhausted and terrified, before the Queen came to the mortal world. The next day he went to check on his sister and found her skin missing.

And another. Of a brother who wanted to save his sister from the Fae. He found his way into the magical world, almost as if by mistake… and died the second the magic touched his skin…

The stories went on, and on. There were so many version of that brother… as if he was stuck in a loop, an eternal, unforgiving loop, and the only thing that stayed the same was his wish to save his sister, and the fact that he never once got to actually _save_ her. He always died. Or she did. No happily ever after.

My own story felt similar. Soon, another version would be added: a girl realizes her sister was taken during the Tithe and goes to save her… and dies.

I knew that if I managed to survive a world of magic, where everything was stronger, faster, and more skilled than me—if I actually managed to get to her— _Elain_ couldn’t be saved. She was changed. Controlled by a being made of pure light. That thing, that immortal, had a hold of her for the rest of her natural born life. She could change her name, her identity, but were the chances of that ever happening? When do people’s very natures, their personalities, change so completely? _No, Mother Nature doesn’t allow that_. No one had that kind of freedom in life.

And she was _changed_. Already. Magic in the Fae world was in the air you breathed, the food you ate, the water you drank, the ground you walked on, the clothes you wore. It was in the glamour. It was said—at least by Baba Yaga—that a moral had two days in the magical world of the fae before they were shitting out magic, too. And by then, there was no going back to a normal, human life. A human body would go with withdrawals that made the opium addicts seem sane and peaceful.

There was no saving Elain. Not really. The only thing I could hope for was that she was herself before she died. The only hope she had of being free of what they were doing to her—was for her _not_ to be herself before she died. And the only way I could help her at all was to kill her before either hope became futile.

I wasn’t going to the faerie kingdom after her to _free_ her. I was doing it to _save_ her. To kill her before…before what, I didn’t know.

I became glad that I’d die before I ever had the hope of reaching out to her.

Still, I’d go. The decision was already made for me.

What did I have here? A dead mother. A dead father. A half-remembered life of wealth and prosperity and happiness. A broken face and a heart filled with fear and shame. A body that felt like it didn’t belong to me. A heartfelt attempt to build a life here with the Town Quora guard so I could become a city-patrolman. Another year—and I’d have that here. A paying job, proper rations, training times, comrades, maybe a house I’d buy, live in, and then leave once I got old and decided to come back to the woods that had made me in the first place so I could die there. That was the future I was looking for. A future that seemed lonely and bleak. Only the knowledge that Elain would someday go off to marry some nice, rich lord who adored her made it better. Only the knowledge that someday, Nesta would get off her ass and do what she was meant to do and own something, control something either as a merchant-queen or a town mayor or—whatever she brought her mind to. And I’d see them grow. And I’d protect them from the world. And I’d wait and watch to see if they needed me before the call of the forest rang out like a death knell.

Now Elain was gone. And Nesta would never, ever let me forget it. Without Elain… Nesta and I were nothing but hated, bitter enemies.

So I cried for a life I’d worked hard to build, a dream I’d been close to grasping. I cried for the fractured relationships in my life. I cried for myself, and the knowledge that I would die soon, in an unfamiliar place, unloved.

 

 

Mostly, I cried for the relief I felt bubbling in my heart. As if the greatest weight in the world had been lifted off my shoulders. As if I'd been given a gift I'd never dared say, or even dare think.

* * *

 

“Where were you?” Nesta snapped. She was holding a brown bag to her chest, clenching it so hard I was worried that it would somehow tear in her arms.

“Miss me?” I asked, knocking my head to have her follow me. “C’mon, let go to an Inn to talk. I’m hungry.” And I needed a Last Meal.

Together we walked to the only Inn in town—Darling Doll—in silence. Inside it was crowded and full and smelled of beer and piss. I had no idea if it was the loudness of people’s conversations or the sheer amount of people, but it was loud. So loud that as I shuffled into a table in the darkest corner of the bright and happy Inn, I had to push my chair close to Nesta’s and talk into her ear.

I told her about Rhys. I told her about Baba Yaga, and about the ‘gift’ that had been given to me. About his little riddle of Fae-lights and rings. About how I would need to figure out what it meant before going to the other world to find her.

“It’s a mushroom circle,” Nesta said as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “They used to be called faerie circles because people thought it was weird that mushroom grew in such a perfect formation. Really, though, it’s just because a true mushroom’s roots are buried down deep and the mushrooms that you see on the surface are just reproduction organs that need to spawn in separate clumps.” I blinked at her, and she shrugged. “Go look for a mushroom circle. I’m guessing it has to be a special one—where lights lead you to.”

“And then?” I frowned, thinking. “I step in? I do a little dance?”

“You sleep in it.” She said, rolling her eyes. “Honestly do you know nothing about the Fae?”

I knew only stories, not facts. Folktales that had so many different variations that it was hard to pin down what story belonged to what. “Apparently not,” I mused, watching her. Short, petite, poised, a face like the sculptured facets of a diamond. There was steel in her. Fire. Tempest. And she was smart. If I was the type of person to learn from my mistakes I might want to wait, prepare, bring her with me. She would be invaluable, I knew. And then she wouldn’t be alone. Waiting, taking her along, would at least live her life in the same dimension as me and Elain.

Yet there was something screaming in me: No. _No. One of us has to live. Somewhere out in the world, there has to be an Archeon._

“I do know one thing. If I go… I won’t be coming back. So, you need to use your smarts right here and right now to build yourself a good life. Make something of yourself.” At the glare of her face, I smiled. “It’s a fresh start, sweet sister.” The lie was stale on my tongue. This would be a change, reality-shaping, but it wouldn’t be a fresh start. I don’t think there is such a thing in real life. “Just… trust. Don’t worry about it too much. Just trust that I will do everything I can for Elain. Till my last dying breath. I will try to save her.” Even if I didn’t believe I could.

“Like you saved mother?” She hissed.

When I only stared at her—her temper flared out. Like I knew it would. “So… that’s it?” She hissed. “You leave me here so I can rot while you try to save her as you did in the market?”

I gave her a sharp look. It was typical of her, to think that I hadn't tried just because I hadn't gone raving mad to save Elain. Because I hadn't let myself die right then--no, even if I had attacked the Light Lord and died, I was sure she'd still consider me a failure. Only if I could preform miracles and deposit Elain directly int her arms would I be considered something worthy. “Yes.”

“I’m coming with—”

“You’ll be more of a liability than anything else,” I said, ignoring how her entire body tensed. “I’m going. And you, sister dear, are going to go up to that bar and offer to work here for wages. The only other thing you could do is whore, and you don’t want to whore in this Town.”  

 “Fuck you.” Nesta snarled. “She was my sister too!”

 “Was?” She knew too, then, what this meant. What I was about to do. I leaned in close. “Would you be willing to sacrifice for her? Throw away your life, the possibilities of a future? Could you run, hunt, kill, face monsters? Trust me implicitly when I tell you to do something?”

Something dark fitted across her light grey eyes. “Would  _you_ ever trust _me_?” She asked.

I would trust Nesta to do what she felt was best. I would trust her to scorn me. And to dominate anything she set her mind to with a single minded determination and momentous will. But trust her to have my back? To have her surviving next to me? “Not really. No. Your instincts aren’t built for this kind of thing.”

“You don’t even know what you’re getting yourself into.” She challenged.

“Yeah, but I know what you’re going to get into.” I nodded my head to the bar as my hand splayed the area around me. “Looks like they’re hiring. Bet if you offered to not be paid, they’ll give you free room and board.” I smiled at the ambiance, at the loud conversations, the open air, the crackling fires, the drinks. Women bustled around, looking harassed and frazzled. “Seems like a good enough life. Sustainable.”

“I fucking hate you. Take me with you!”

“With that attitude?”

She snarled. “I bet as soon as you go to Fae you’ll disappear. Run off and live like a savage in the woods. You won't look for her.”

I couldn’t answer her for a second, my eyes on the table, my finger’s moving along the grain. When my eyes rose, I looked at her, undaunted to see our mother’s fierce gaze in mine.

“Why?” I asked. I’d never see her again and for some reason, because of it, I felt like I had the right—the privilege—to be honest with her. “Why do you always hurt me? Have I not proven myself? Have I not tried, not sacrificed enough? I’ve done everything I possibly can for you and Elain. Gone above and beyond while you sat on your ass and judged me. And I can live with that, I really can. Don’t even blame you for taking and demanding and never considering me a person. But… but I can’t live with how you discarded me.” I could feel tears in my eyes, and I let them build, not clearing my throat as it got thick. “You’d do anything for Elain. You’ll give her your heart and soul. Why can’t you even just give me the barest hint of friendship? Of love? Do you not have anything left—”

“You killed our mother,” Nesta said with a cold voice, dismissing me to watch the bar.

“Oh.” I hadn’t known… suddenly, the comment she made earlier became clear.

I discarded the pain. Discarded the memories. “I didn’t know you knew.”

As if she couldn’t be near me a second more, she stood up. I reached out for her, grabbing and touching her for the first time in years to get her to still. “Stay away from anyone who goes by Bushor or the local gang. If you get associated with them, they own you for life. It’ll be a bad life, Nesta, trust me. Keep your nose clean and your head above water. You’re smart and you’re strong-willed and I’m sure that if you put your mind to it, you’ll own the damn town by the time you’re thirty.”

My grip on her tightened as her face turned into a sneer. “And Nesta? Don’t marry Arnel Voliage. I don’t care what society says. I don’t care what mother taught you. Don’t grab onto any man whose interested in you just so you can get the entire thing over with. You know you’ll never love a man. You’re not hardwired for it.”

That was the best and the only goodbye I could ever give her. We were kin, but we weren’t family. There was no sentiment or love between us.

I put the rest of the purse in her hand, the coins heavy.

“Don’t disappoint me.” Is all she said. She walked away, towards the bar.

I didn’t watch her talk to the barmaid. I didn’t see if she’d get the job. Maybe that made me a terrible sister or a bad person—but again… the decision was easy. And I didn’t want her to come with me.

* * *

 

I decided to appreciate the winter as I walked back to the cottage. A few hours of simple walking and enjoyment sounded nice… the kind of goodbye I think I needed for the sake of closure. My boots were new and no water was leaking through the soft leathers. My cloak was warm, protective and strangely heavy with the quality of fabric. The strange wetness was still here, reminding me as I walked of that single instance of blissful, out-of-body pleasure. The path was made soft, gentle, silent by the falling snow. It fell so gently down to the ground it was as if the darkness of night was called by the stars in the sky.

The cottage was a sad, sorry, broken thing as I walked to it. Caved in and reeking. I was quick to shove on the heavy layers and to fill my pack with what I needed. I took things that I had never taken on my hunting grounds before, things like all the sewing thread and the lightweight pot, the rope and father’s old baldrick, the one thing of his I’d never sold. It was of a strong and worn leather with lots of little loops in it for knives and a lower loop for a sword I didn’t own. I put my favorite, sharpest hunting knives in the loops and my wet stone in the tiny fold of leather made just for it. The rest of the jerkied meat and the iodine went into my pack.

I was prepared—or at least as much as I could be for whatever I was walking into…

I left, letting the door stay open so the snow and cold air could enter the place and wreak havoc. Destroy what little shelter the hovel could offer.

As I left, walking deeper North into the woods, I realized that there truly was no hesitation in my heart. That I didn’t want to be here anymore, in this village, in this world. I'd die--sure, but everyone dies. Even immortal Fae.

I had been hoping, praying, dreaming about this very thing happening since the moment I’d laid my eyes on Rhys. Somehow, my sister’s misfortune was my deepest desire.

With every step, a weight was taken off my shoulders.

The nighttime, thanks to my gift, was a collection of perfect bark and snowy banks. Shadows were solid and deep but they held no dangers, no mysteries. The world was open to me.

A shaft of light caught my eye. The moon peeking through the swaying leaves. I headed towards it, but as I did, it disappeared. To the left, more moonlight—which also disappeared. It went on like that for a good hour, making me go deeper and deeper to the North.

When the light stopped shining, I looked around. There was no moonlight leaking through the leaves here. No more leading. As I looked at the ground I saw mushrooms. A huge circle of them, just beyond, so wide across that I would have missed it if I wasn’t looking.

I shrugged off my pack, putting it dead center into the loose ring of mushrooms in the icy ground, the snow, the mud. I wrapped my cloak tight around me and put my head on the pack.

For some reason, it was very easy to sleep tonight.


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elain POV

As soon as my feet touched the ground—I collapsed onto it and puked. My stomach, my head, they still spun with that strange, horrible feeling. Like something had grabbed a hold of my spine and was yanking me across the surface of the earth faster than I could imagine.

My vomit was clear and stingingly hot. It lashed out at me as my stomach rolled, arching my back up. I could feel the splashes of it on my cheeks, my hands, my knees.

 _What an impression_ , I couldn’t help but laugh before the convulsion caught me again and I was helpless to my body’s desires.

A sharp sound, deep but musical, spoke in a language I didn’t understand. It flowed and ebbed in a way I’d never heard before but was pure music, pure expression. It was so beautiful I wanted to participate. I wanted to join in. I repeated a sound  _adurah_  under my breath.  _Adurah_. It sounded clumsy on my tongue in comparison. I tried to say I didn’t understand, but even that sounded clumsy compared to their speech.

Hot hands started to rub my back. They were small and delicate and moved in gentle little circles that quickly felt like the heat of the sun soaking into my skin, warming me from the inside. The hot hands grabbed my hair, protecting it from the vomit that heaved from my chest.

 “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I knew that voice. Even though I’d only heard it a few times before, but I knew the voice of the beautiful Elven Fae man. My stomach did too—and it tried to redouble its efforts as it remembered the sensation of being yanked across worlds. “The folding can be tough on mortals. I didn’t want…” He broke off into a different language, speaking beautifully. The voices rose in reply.  _Adurah--Adurah_ they kept saying. 

I looked up through blurry tears, trying to hold back the convulsions for just a second to look up… but he wasn’t where I could see him. Instead, the world was a painful shine of color. I had to quickly lower my face back down as I heaved.

“There now.” A lilting voice said, as beautiful as the way a sonnet feels. “Shhh…” That smooth, feminine voice said. “Shhh…”

More voices were rising. That rolling language—as if the language and songs of birds had come alive to greet human tongues—was bouncing across the walls of—of wherever I was. They spoke in rushed and scared tones. As my body stilled, I blinked away my tears and I listened. It meant nothing to me, but it was still so beautiful. It reminded me of the way water bubbles across rocks. It gave the same feeling, the same texture, as a chorus lifting up to high, lofty ceilings.

The voices rose higher, the duet ending in a rush of yelling and shouting. Dizzy, I tried to look up as hot hands stilled on my back. 

A strange sound went through the hall. Like a cat's hiss, but louder. I blinked through my tears, fighting the undertow of my own swimming head... everything was so  _bright_. So impossibly bright. It was like staring into the sun. I squeezed my eyes, heaving again as afterimages danced in my eyes.

"Lucien!" That familiar, wonderful voice I knew yelled.

Again, that strange sound of a hiss. Of beautiful, unknowable words were spoken by even more beautiful voices...

Impossibly hot hands grabbed at me. Like a vice made of burning fire, my head was jerked up. I opened my eyes to see the blurry image of light in the shape of a figure... but the burning hands was the last straw.

I gladly excepted the darkness that took over my mind. Even if it was the brightest darkness I'd ever seen in my life.

* * *

 

Someone was singing. The tune was complicated and soft--a lullaby. I tried to focus on the words--but she was speaking a language I didn't understand. 

 _Teach me, Mother_. I pleaded. My tongue was so heavy.

A soft sigh ran through the room as the singing stopped. Warm, gentle hands lifted up the back of my head and something cool and smooth was put to my lips. Startled, I tried to resist, but the liquid inside was impossible to ignore. Warm, fragrant: it was the sweetest, thickest, richest of cremes. The fullest flavor of honeys. 

"Sleep, Spring-heart. Sleep." The wonderful, familiar voice of the perfect man said. "Fall asleep and dream of me, wake and dream of me, Elain."

Sleep sounded wonderful.

* * *

Lynne looked at me with a devious smile on her perfect face. The scent of her--like jasmine and lavender--filling my nose as her jade-and-gold eyes sparkled in the mid-day sun. "Okay, let's go over it again."

"Once Tamlin enters the palace, I'll come from the left and you come from the right. Then we'll hit him with the Bogge snot." I said, leaning towards her. Talking to Lynne was fun. Funner than any person I've ever talked to before. I'd realized, in the years we'd spent together, that she was the sister I'd always wanted to have.

My family, who'd been killed by the vaganbond Fae who'd orginally taken me as a human pet, was a distant thought. A very far away memory of... dancing. And watching two figures tackle each other into snow. One that always made me a little sad. Sometimes, if I thought really--really--hard on the subject, I could imagine a mother who told me wonderful things and made fanciful parties. And sisters--two of them, for whatever reason--who were... nothing like Lynne.

It was when I realized they were nothing at all like Lynne that the daydreaming ended. Because reality was so much sweater than whatever fantasy land I conjured up.

"Oh, he's going to smell  _so bad_." Lynne screeched, her beautiful full giggle filling up my soul, inch by inch.

It was hard to imagine  _Tamlin_ smelling bad. The Lord of the Spring court smelled like fresh earth and new rain and budding flowers. There was no way he could smell bad. Even with Bogge snot covering him. My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Lynne's wide grin again grew devious. "Oh, girl, you have it  _bad_." 

"Shut up!" I wailed. I had to cover my flaming cheeks with my hands. "I do not!" I could  _not_ have it bad for a  _High Lord_. As a human... no, he would never even look at me that way. He couldn't. For one, I was rather drab, especially compared to the Elven Fae... for two, well, he was  _Tamlin_. The most glorious, handsome, dashing man I'd ever met in my entire life. There was no way that I could fall for him because there was no way he'd look at me twice. "I'm just your silly human friend," I muttered, pouting between my hands.

"Ooh-ho," Lynne teased. "A very  _pretty_ human friend." She jabbed me in the ribs with her golden, delicate elbow. 

"I am pretty, aren't I?" I beamed at her. 

She giggled. "Oh! I think I see him coming up the drive--come on, get into position. I'll glamour your smell till he comes in. Remember, as soon as he get's past the doors. My glamour won't work on him for long." With a grin, Lynne was running off, tight, honey-gold curls bouncing and swaying as she jumped to the right of the door. 

I moved to the left, looking at her, feeling my love for her shine through my heart as I peaked at her eager face. If Tamlin was the most beautiful male I'd ever seen in my life, then Lynne was the most beautiful female. Maybe it was because of genetics--but their beauty seemed deeper than that. More substantial. While Lynne was undoubtedly gorgeous with her jade-and-gold eyes, so massive on her face that she seemed almost a doll, and her dark freckles that swarmed and dotted her face, and her thick lips, and heart shaped face, and heavy head of springing curls, and beautiful frame... well, yes. She was gorgeous. But  _every_ Elven Fae was gorgeous. She and Tamlin were special because of they warmth, the light that shown in their eyes. The way their laughter and words seemed to heal some sad part of me that I didn't even know needed to be healed till they were doing it. 

I was so thankful they'd grabbed me. So thankfully that they'd bought me off the vagabond Fae who'd taken me from the human world as for a pet-slave. I could never imagine a childhood or a life better than being raised in the Spring Court with Lynne and Tamlin. 

For as long as I could remember, it had been the three of us. Lynne had been there to help me pick out my dress for my Awakening Day. Tamlin had taught me to read, how to write. They'd taught me to horse-back ride. How to be a lady. Lynne had snuck into my tower so I could go dancing with her in the moonlight. Tamlin had given me my first kiss--right on the cheek--that wonderful day three years ago when I'd scrapped my finger on a knife accidentally.

I looked down, fingering the scar on my skin, blushing at the memory. It was still angry and red--it always looked angry and red. As if it had never healed. I rubbed the ridge of it, feeling--as if he was kissing me right now--the soft heat of his lips on the right side of my face. Right next to the burn on my chin that I couldn't remember receiving, but fit the mold of my fingers if I held my chin just right.

"Vorta!" Lynne hissed, making me jerk my head up. "Snot up! Snot up!"

Seeing her smile never failed to make me smile, too. Grinning like fools, we heard Tamlin coming up the steps...

He came into view and--like always--took my breath away. He was wearing his typical clothes. His chest was naked, exposing the gold bars in his nipples that Lynne had told me, ages and ages ago, meant he had gone through a Trial to get his Lordship. He had his seven heavy gold bands around his left bicep--a symbol of the different Providences of his territory--and his gossamer skirt today was of a deep green color. The thin, see-through bolt of fabric did nothing to hide his powerful thighs or the heavy length of him between those thighs.

I watched that heavy length bob and sway as he walked through the doors.

"Now!" Lynne cried out. She threw her bucket of Bogge snot.

And it splashed right onto her skin. I always had a hard time following magic. It looked as if she threw the bucket of snot forward, where Tamlin was walking--but it splashed onto her instead. My mind couldn't--wouldn't--follow the break in natural laws of... 

Natural laws of what? Magic was all I knew. I'd seen strange, unexplainable displays like this a hundred thousand times before. 

"Hmmm, at least  _you_ were smart." Tamlin's voice was a deep, powerful, male rumble in my ear. I shivered at the feeling of his hot breathe on the shell of my ear. And then his long, golden, strong hand reached over me to grab the bucket of Bogge snot from my hands. He held it up, sniffing it. 

He was so  _close_. I could smell him, the earthly, new scent of Spring air. Feel the way his body radiated heat. See every perfect line of him, the softness of his muscles, the power of his frame. I felt my face heating--not even bothering to look at the bucket he let slip out of his hand, only to disappear before it could touch the floor. From behind me--across the doorway--Lynne screeched and a bucket clattered to the floor.

"Hello, Vorta." He murmured, reaching for me. The heat of his skin was nothing compared to the heat in my face as he touched a strange lock of hair that had escaped my twisted braid and tugged. His green eyes shone like their own green suns. "Glad to see you not falling into peer-pressure anymore."

"I--I," I was saved from speaking as we both turned to Lynne's wail.

"This was my favorite dress Tamlin!" She said. From head to toe she was covered in vicious grey snot that smelled like--like... I knew what it smelled like. Bogge snot smelled like... something that made my chest tight. Made me think, oddly, of a small stone room falling in on itself, covered in herbs and fire-smoke to mask the distinct smell of Bogge's snot; which smelled like my body smelled when I didn't bathe for a few days--only times one hundred--and gross smell from the guard's latrines before their bodily fluids were whisked away to the Pocket Dimension. 

I looked at her dress. It really was one her favorites. A deep orange, it made her golden skin turned russet colored, the gossamer cut to expose the sides of her breasts and stomach and hips, despite the fact that the fabric did nothing to hide the rest of her body. All of it was now covered in gross grey snot.

"Come on, Ladies shouldn't have to smell this." Tamlin teased, grabbing my hand in his large warm one. 

"Vorta!" Lynne wailed. "Don't be a traitor, Vorta! I'm in _need_!" 

I couldn't help it. I looked down to his swaying dick. Then quickly jerked my head back up before he could notice. His green eyes laughed as they watched his sister--though he still led me froward into the palace. "Hurry, before she cleans herself and we're stuck with her." With a wink, he tugged on me.

I fell into his arms, against his chest, as if I'd always belonged there. Because I did.

A horrible tugging sounded across my spine as I was yanked through space and time--

And landed softly in his office. I'd only been in it a few times over the years. I still couldn't help but admire the thin cut crystal walls--so thin you could see through them to his garden lands beyond, as if looked through a gently warped mirror. It was marbled with greens, golds, pinks, purples, and every other color of crystal in his magnificent, Crystal Palace. A mural had been cut perfectly and expertly into it, so where the green slashes were was grass, and where the dotted colors of pinks and purples lay were the delicate petals of flowers. And the blue swirls was cut wind. The golds the softly grazing deer--

I knew what deer tasted like. The stringy, gamey taste of it--

"Vorta." Tamlin's strong voice made me look up. I smiled into his green eyes. "Tell me how you'r studies are going." He said, still holding me into his soft, warm frame.

 _I've never tasted deer a day in my life. I was too young to have had meet when Tamlin took me in. And we don't eat meat here in the Spring Court._ Odd-that I'd ever thought of deer as  _meat_. 

"I finally learned your secret." I said, realizing, for the first time, that I was alone with him. I felt shy as I smiled up at him, my hands resting on the toned, warm expansive of his taunt stomach. Tamlin was completely hairless: only his streaming gold hair, his eyebrows, and his lashes showed any sign of it. The rest of him was smooth. Without even a pore for hair  _to_ grow from.

As always, his beauty struck my physically. Made me need, somewhere deep in my chest. It was almost painful, to look at him.

"Oh?" He asked, smiling his wonderful, dazzling smile that exposed all of his white teeth. "What's that?"

"You took a sliver of the Night Court when you became Lord," I teased; Or I tried to tease. Instead, my voice came out a little awed. I was running my hand across his skin. I'd never touched him so intimately before. Never been so  _close_ to him before. I peaked up at him through my lashes, to see his face intently watching mine.

Tamlin hadn’t taken his Lordship in the traditional way: by killing the last Lord. He was too kind for that. Instead, once his parents had been killed by the Night Lord—he’d decided to take over his Uncle’s Court through a Trial. No one would tell me what the Trial _was_ , only that it was hard and could kill the people who participated in it. But Tamlin had won, and his strange antisocial Uncle, Lucien, had lost. Tamlin was so successful, so loved by his people, that securing his inner and outer Boundaries had been _easy_. Something that never happened.

And Spring, being on of the southern Courts to the massive Northern Night Court, had taken a bit of the Night for himself. For killing his father and uncles. For dominating Prythian.

It was something my governess told me _never_ happened. Not in the history of the Night Court had their lands been taken. When the powerful, chaos-ridden Fae of the ancient days had decided they wanted rules and boundaries—and created the Court System—they’d each taken an equal portion of land. Back then, Spring hadn’t existed. We—the land I was in—used to belong to Autumn. At least, before Tamlin had won the land from his Uncle, who’d killed his father for it, who’d killed his father’s father for it—all the way back to when Autumn was carved from untamed power. Until Tamlin decided to end the bloodshed. And, slowly, as Lords were displaced and boundaries became unstable, as wars progressed and court games finished bloody, the Night Court had spread and spread. Now it dominated half the continent, so large and bloated that the other Courts had not only diminished in size but in  _numbers,_  too. 

The Night Court never gave up it’s land. Because it was never unstable. The original Lord who’d carved out the area from chaos was the same Lord who ruled over it now. And he didn’t give anything, my governess said. When bordering courts blurred their boundaries, the Night Court protected their land fiercely with it’s winged and fanged armies. It never gave up a thing.

Except to Tamlin

“Ah, you caught me.” He huffed, sending a warmth breathe down into my face. “You want to know a real secret, Vorta?” He asked, reaching up to trail hot fingers down the side of my face.

“Yes.” I gasped. Being around Tamlin was… different than anything I’d ever felt before. It made me feel loose and quake, made my nerve endings dance. Touching him, looking at me, made me realize that the space between my legs was a pulsating, living thing that needed and ached.

His smile was soft, and bitter. “In the last few seconds and the power was forming, I stepped onto the Night Court land. The battle was raging towards the East… and I just stepped inside. That’s how much of the Night Court’s power I own. A single footstep.” His laugh hurt my chest.

“Tamlin…”

He pulled away from me, shaking his golden head softly. I watched as he walked to the edge of his smooth, white-stone desk and leaned against it. I tried to ignore how the soft shape between his legs wasn’t as soft as before.

“What else have you learned, Vorta?” He asked, tilting his head. “How does that little mind of yours work?”

“Well…” Blushing, I put my hands behind my back. I didn’t like to wear the Spring Court clothes, with their single bolt of sea-through fabric. Thankfully, they didn’t put it on me. It was for Fae only. Instead, they’d given me a white dress that hung shapeless over my frame, the straps so tiny, the back covered with the design of a butterfly as it swung between my knees and ankles. It covered my thin frame, giving me the modesty I needed… but I wanted to be naked like that before him. Exposed. I wanted him to see _me_. Not as his sister’s favorite playmate but as a woman. Who wanted him desperately.

“Bargains are bad.” I mused. “Gifts always have an… a—boon?” When he nodded, I smiled, pleased I remembered. “So gifts always make the receiver beholden to them. Except for you. You’ve given me food, shelter, clothes… everything. For free.”

“Not for free.” He corrected. “You’re a slave here, Vorta. A well beloved one…”

“But still a slave.” I walked towards the wall, to see out of the crystal wall. In the distance, the dart blot of mountains that was the Night Court loomed, darkening the otherwise perfect spring day. “I know humans can’t exist in the Fae world without being a slave… but…”

His presence was all heat. All wonderful, smooth heat as he stood behind me. His hands seemed to reach up, but then dropped away. I tried to ignore how it made my stomach flip and my core tingle. As if he had touched me. “I’d free you if I could.”

“But you can’t.” I smiled softly into the crystal, watching the way the sun took the cut abstractions and glowed. “Because of the Laws.” Every human in the land was a slave. There were some countries, like the Night Court, that had millions of millions of slaves, made to work and die without the sun. Tamlin had dismissed every human slave in his land, when he'd become Lord. But he'd seen me when the trader came and he'd bought me, despite his vows. Because I had a Spring-soul. That's what he said. 

“I…”

I turned to him. Pinned between the wall and his hot frame, I wished he’d lean down and kiss me. I looked over his smooth, golden features. His perfect, thick lips. Being around him, his smell, his heat, made my head swim. “What would you do, if I was free?”

“I’d love you—as I love you now.” His honest words, the earnestness to his face, made my chest tighten.

“You… love me?”

“Of course I love you.” He smiled gently, his forehead coming down to rest on mine, warming my skin as if I was touched by the sun. “I love everything about you. Your mind, your soul, your beauty. You are…”

“Adurah.”

He froze above me. “Where… did you hear that?” He asked.

“I don’t remember.” I frowned, wishing I hadn’t spoken. He’d been so _close_ to kissing me. Finally. His distance made me ache. “No—I’m sorry.” I reached for his biceps, holding his smooth skin in my hands. “Tamlin, please, don’t—”

He shook his head. “There is a way, for you to be free, Vorta.” He stepped out of my reach, his green eyes glowing. “A way for you to no longer be a slave…”

“How?” Heart beating fast, I tried to reach for him again. He stepped back further. “Tamlin— _how_.”

“Her name… is Amarantha. She is a powerful Fae that resides in the very center of the land, under a mountain. She… she could...”

“Let me see her then.” Delighted, I grinned up at him, trying to catch his green eyes.

His face closed off. “I’ve said too much already. I’m sorry, but it’s not an option right now. Not how thing are.” He grabbed my hand gently in his. The press of his lips made me realize how very sensitive my skin could be. “Let’s go back—Lynne has probably cleaned the snot off by now. Come on.” He led me, walking backwards, out of his office.

"But..." With freedom, I could be  _his_. In a real way. Not as a slave, but a beloved... maybe even a consort.  

“You’re life here is good, Vorta. Isn’t it?” Tamlin asked, distracting me. "Isn't it the best life you can imagine?"

"Oh, Tamlin, it is. It really is." I smiled at him, feeling a strange sadness I couldn't explain sitting heavy inside me. I again thought of two girls, running around and tackling each other. "It really, really is."

He reached up, smoothing the hair from my face, and the pain was forgotten.


	7. Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feyre POV

I’m pretty sure I’m going to die in this miserable place.

First—the ash had tried to suffocate me. Then the deer had tried to impale me. Now the very air was trying to poison me.

The deer thing hurt the worst. Not because of the ugly gash but because of how fucking ironic it was for a fucking deer to decide to come charging at me. Here, in the wonderful and magical land of Fae—the stags were massive, shaggy, golden antlered cousins to the normal deer back on Earth.

They were perhaps three times the size, looking more like overgrown war-horses than anything else, but the antlers were the worst of them. Usually, the antlers looked like boned tree-branches jutting from the top of a deer’s head, right by the ears, and fanning outwards. They were a form of protection, a way to show dominance to other male deer. I’d seen a few, a few summers ago, clash with each other by charging and having their antler’s tangle and smash. After a bit of jumping, one twisted right and the looser trotted off so the winner could mount a doe.

Normal shit. Normal Nature.

But the deer here seemed to have antlers like growing, fucked up crowns. They were great, steaming—literally, the antler’s themselves steamed in the cold, ashy air—and twisting and arching to make strange designs and nests that rose from the top of their heads, came inwards and outwards over their frames, and upwards and downwards so the tops looked like deer crowns and the bottoms like neck bevor made of bone. They were also sharper than they would be naturally, so it looked like an armor set of thorns and bones in a too tall and too thick neck. It was at once beautiful, horrible, and deadly.

The evil bastards knew they were deadly, too, and took advantage. When I’d woken, I was half buried in ash so fine and so slippery thin that I’d felt like I’d been covered by oil—oil that tried to drift into my lungs, to suffocate me. There was also this strange pain in my belly that made me want to keel over and vomit. Instead, I sneezed, gasping in even more of the oily ash.

When I managed to stop coughing and drag myself from the ashes, I tried to take in my surroundings. I barely got a glimpse of black and smooth towering trees. Of ash that blanketed the grown in trenches, and a sky bloody and grotesque letting the ash fall down… down… down…

And then the damn deer happened.

It was charging at me before I could really see it coming and I managed to dodge out of the way just fast enough that it got my arm with one of its too sharp antler’s instead of my gut. The ash had oddly helped my escape. Its slippery surface made me fall sideways to evade. The deer hadn’t even managed to break my bones.

I was left coughing and bleeding in the ash as I looked up to see… the damn deer. It was golden in the grey and red world. The ash didn’t seem to touch it or tarnish it’s golden, steaming antler’s or it’s golden, shaggy hide. It was staring at me with golden eyes so intelligent that I felt like it was judging me, hating me for having killed its lesser cousin in the human world and daring to come here.

Stare at the golden deer long enough, you can see it blink. It did so, as we had our little showdown. I tried not to breathe in the ash as I waited for it to do something. Eventually, it decided to charge again. I nearly managed to stab it in its great chest as it came for me but it careened away at the last minute, screaming an unnatural scream that seemed impossible. It then disappeared into black trees and ashy grounds.

I decided then that the Fae world fucking sucked.

The ash got into my wound. Even the precious iodine I used to clean it got sullied by the falling ash and the oily spread on my fingers. I’m pretty sure ash was in there, in that delicate layer between skin and muscle… but no infection yet.

The red sky never shifted, never changed. It stayed a dull, constant, half bright thing as I walked and slept and ate the contaminated jerky in my bag. As I shivered and as I coughed and as I got sick. I slept five times—so I’d been out here almost a week—but I couldn’t be sure. I just knew that there was something in the air deadlier than the ash.

I was having a very hard time breathing. Every time I coughed or sneezed from the oil that had drenched the scrap of cloth I used to cover my nose and mouth—I would bleed. Sometimes I’d taste the blood in my mouth, sometimes it would just trickle down the back of my throat. My stomach was cramping and every time I pissed and shit, the color of it would get redder and redder as if it was trying to mimic the damn sky.

And my eyesight… I was slowly going blind. That had been harder to tell than all the rest and harder to take, too. At first, things just got blurry, like the ash had gotten into my eyes. It would do that, cling to my lashes, mixing grey with grey so the world looked blurry. The consequent tears would mix with the oil already on my skin and it would be a huge mess of crying and stinging eyes. I thought it was just that… but it was getting harder to distinguish that strange black trees from the ground. Harder to tell the difference between the bloody sky and the falling ash.

I was also getting hives. Horrible, blistering things that itched like crazy but if I itched them, my ragged and chewed nails would rip through my skin like paper. The animals that came at me also tore at my skin. Even the rabbits here were vicious and horned.

The only thing this horrible world could throw at me that would make all of it worse was the idea of night time. Of imaging a darkness so complete that in my blindness, I’d never see a thing.

I was going to die here. As if my body was trying to agree, a sudden coughing fit took over as my swollen throat constricted and blood filled my mouth. I kept walking.

It was all a valiant effort on my part.  _I’d tried, Mother Nature. I’d really tried to save her. But you had to fucking kill me before I could._

I was going to die. Might as well die walking. Trying. Living. Keeping that blind and stupid promise to Nesta. If I laid down in the ash again—even if I was dead tired and needed sleep—I’d probably refuse to get up again. And that would be such a disappointment. Mother Nature wasn’t fucking getting me that easily. No, the Bitch would have to work for my soul.

 

Was I shaking because of my sickness? Because I was so tired? Because it was colder than winter here, in this wasteland? Tremors, uncontrollable, were wrecking through my hands and feet and weirdly, my heart. It made my blurry vision dance and wobble—

So, of course, I didn’t see the damn Fae until it was right there.

The trees of the place are a dark grey that looked like they were black until you got so close that you could see the texture of the smooth, marble-like surface. No mark, not like any I’d known, but a smooth and strange steel-texture with little lines and rivets in it that had true black in them. The branches above had twisting thorns, not leaves. If there was any shrubbery, any other kinds of plants, they were buried beneath the ash. And the Fae blended in with all that. Only the weird, strange sparks of red—red brighter, more magmatic than the blood sky—told me there was something strange ahead. Not just a little tree, but… something. I stopped, nearly stumbling as the momentum released me. I realized, then, that because I had stopped I would not keep going. Even if the Fae was not there, I had no energy for another step. I gasped, I ached, I felt the tremors rock my body.

I watched the grey and bright red blob in front of me tilt a little as if cocking its head. It moved like a person. Had the proportions of a person. Had to be a person, right?

“W—” My throat hurt so bad that I could feel the blood trickling down as I spoke, raw tissue rubbing against each other. “What do’y want?”

“Oer aye ‘umain?” The thing in front of me asked. It had a very deep voice.

“Obviously!” I snapped, swaying and shaking and trying not to choke on the blood in my mouth and down my throat. “I’m fucking dying, aren’t I?”

It laughed—wicked and smooth. Then the blackness took over and I was gone.


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elain POV

I didn’t like being alone. Even here, in Tamlin’s palace… I didn’t like it.

So when I heard the knocking on the door, I rushed over to open it, surging out of my massive four-poster bed to swing the heavy door of my pink-crystal tower open. My usual maids, Lunesta and Callium, never knocked. They came in, chattering away and telling me the Palace gossip as they got me up and dressed for the day—but as I opened the door, I realized that these two Fae standing there were _not_ Lunesta and Callium.

“Oh, ah, hello.” I said, looking between them. They weren’t Elven Fae, with the perfect human-like looks. One had skin that was pure black, like oil, her features longer and leaner than a human’s would be—like her skeleton had been pulled and stretched and painted black. Her eyes shone—like there were candles—inside perfectly round, black sockets. The other one had pale orange skin and dark brown hair with the consistency of leaves. She wore brown, as if she wanted to be seen as a tree in Autumn.

It didn’t matter what they looked like. I was just glad for their company. “Hello—please, come in.” Lynne had smelled the tower so no one could come in without permission. I stepped aside as they moved past the threshold.

The tree one nodded to me. “I am Saacha.”

“Dyne.” The other side.

They had none of the cheerful, boisterous energy of my usual ladys-in-waiting. “What happened to Lunesta and Callium?” I asked, shutting the door.

“They are on an errand for a fox.” Saacha said, smiling.

“Look at you!” Dyne cried out suddenly, making me jump. “You are so thin, you look like me!” She cackled, her laughter like fire and logs.

“I…” I brushed my hand over my stomach, feeling the tightness under my night-dress. I _was_ thin. I’d always been thin, though. Even next to the twisted beauty of the fae women, I was thin, shallow-skinned, and pale. Even compared to Dyne, who’s face was half as long as mine and narrowed like an arrowhead, I was dull and simple.

“Oh, it’s okay. A few more months and you’ll plump right up.” Saacha said.

“And the period blood will flow!” Dyne grabbed me with hot black hands that weren’t oily, despite their looks. “Come, come, let’s get you ready.”

As Dyne lead me towards my vanity, Saacha asked, “Who was the last one, again?”

“Mia.” Dyne pushed me into a chair of my vanity. The crystal shelf jutted out from the gently bowled walls of my pink tower. The crystal had been cut so expertly that the wall itself reflected us. “Strange one, her…” Dyne’s bright, shining eyes did not blink. I don’t think there were sockets for her eyes _to_ blink, but the light inside them did stutter and sway like a candle in a draft. “Lord Tamlin always chooses the strangest of humans to grab. I thought she could move the earth itself to her will.” She looked at me, her gaze flickering brighter. “Not that you have that problem, mortal.”

“Oh, no, your positively mundane.” Saacha said, nodding, smiling, patting my head gently.

“Mia spoke to the plants.” Dyne explained, opening my wardrobe to expose my familiar, identical dresses. She cried out at the sight of them.

“Mia…had magic?” I asked, confused. I had never heard of Mia before. Never heard of Tamlin taking another human slave. He’d never told me he _hadn’t_ though.

Dyne and Saacha looked at me, suddenly earily quiet as I sat there in front of my vanity, watching their reflections. “Oh, Child. She was mortal, like you.” Dyne said. “Born in a land _without_ magic.”

“Without magic?” I frowned. “How is that possible. Magic is everywhere.”

“It is odd, I know.” Saacha sighed. “They say Mia lived in a land without magic, which lives… parallel to ours, or on top of, or inside. I do not know.” She waved a delicate brown hand into the air. “They say only the High Lords have the ability to go to this odd land—to step _into_ it, but only if the time is just right, and only when it is there turn. Tamlin stepped, and came back with Mia.”

“She didn’t know magic—but magic, it _knew_ her.” Dyne said, nodding.

“She began to speak to the plants. And Tamlin, seeing it, made the garden for her.” The garden? I looked to the murky pink crystal, as if I could see through it to the massive circle of flowers that surrounded the palace.

“Oh—how her little mortal life burst like a flame!”

“Only to be snuffed out too soon.” Dyne sniffed.

“How—”

Saacha interrupted me with the squeal. “Oh! I love these dresses! The fashion of the Ancient Forrest is so _interesting_.”

“I thought they were Spring Court fashion?” I asked, confused. I was starting to get a massive headache. I leaned forward, rubbing the skin at my temples as the pounding started.

“Oh, no, it is Ancient Forrest fashion. It is called a handkerchief dress, used to sop up tears and blood. For the mortals, just like you. The _Adurah_.”

 _Adurah… Adurah_ … I knew that word. How did I know that word? I flinched as something snapped against my skin. Like a rubber band. I rubbed at the scar on my hand, the one that never healed.

“I like it.” I said, interrupting whatever Saacha and Dyne had been saying. I turned to smile at them. “The dresses. The fabric is very fine. I’ve never worn anything like it.”

“Were you poor?” Dyne asked. They did not seem to have the same social etiquette as humans did. They were blunt, to the point, asking questions I’ve never been asked before, saying things with a frank honesty that made me smile—when it wasn’t directed at me.

I was glad for the change in conversation, though. “For a while. Though I was born very wealthy. My parents had been merchants. Sometimes….” What was I saying? What had I just been thinking?

“Almost almost.” Saacha chirped. Like a bird in a tree.

“You have breakfast plans, little mortal. Come.” Dyne said. She grabbed my hand. I cried out as I was pulled from the vanity seat and then _yanked_ —

I stumbled into smooth crystal floors. I grabbed at the hot hand holding me—Dyne’s—as I gasped, trying not to vomit as my eyes swam and my head felt like it was ballooning.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Saacha said, reaching her hot hands for me.

“Such a delicate thing!” Dyne murmured.

I gasped at them, trying to smile, trying to tell them not to worry, but my stomach had turned into liquid and for some reason, I realized I needed to pee. Very, very badly. I was about to tell them that when a sharp, familiar voice spoke from a doorway to our right. My head shot up, looking for the source of that soft, singing voice.

Tamlin stood in a crystal cut doorway. Today, he was wearing a blue gossamer dress. His nipples shone in the gentle light through the crystals, the sharp v of his hipbones exposed as the fabric flowed around his ankles and his naked feet. As always, my eyes drifted to the shape of his cock. It was soft. Big.

“You,” He repeated, his eyes not on me, his voice different than I ever remember hearing it. “What are you doing with the mortal?”

“Oh, just having a bit of fun.” Saacha said, petting my head.

“We very much wanted to meet the little mortal,” Dyne said.

“She’s so soft, so delicate.”

“Her blood  _sings_.”

“I wonder, will she be like little Mia?”

I felt odd, huddled up between their arms, their bodies, their hands. Their skin was so hot, and with them pressed against me like this, I was feeling even more lightheaded.  _Heatstroke_ , that’s what it felt like. Once, in the gardens back home, before moving away from the family estate, I’d been out gardening too long and had fainted from the heat. Nesta had poured water over my head gently, gave me chilled water for my throat, cradled me in the shade till the dizziness passed. There was no Nesta here, though, in this strange world of immortal creatures.

“Go.” Tamlin ordered.

The power in his voice, the pure authority, made me quake. I’d never heard him speaking like that before. Not once.

“We are her trusted  _ofiara_ , come to lead her to her natural end,” Saacha said, grinning. Her mouth looked odd, too wide, her leaf-hair rustling against her.

Tamlin stepped forward—and they fled. Gone so quickly that I stumbled from their lack of being, having leaned on them just seconds ago. Tamlin moved quickly over to me, grabbing me by my hands with big, gentle ones. His heat was so lovely compared to theirs. And I realized, as he led me with his gentle hands, that I needed to be touched by him. Needed it so badly that all at once, I was aching with that need. “Come on.” He said, his beautiful shining eyes tight as looking down the halls as he walked me backwards into the room he’d come out of.

“I… I’m supposed to meet Lynne for breakfast.” I said, helpless to do anything but follow him where he led me. It felt different when he touched me. Deeper. Instead of getting a heatstroke from his warmth, I felt warm from the inside.

“I hadn’t heard anything about that.” Lynne said, from behind Tamlin. She was sitting at a white-styled table, the top of it a glossy mosaic to look like the rising—or falling—of the sun on a horizon. On top was steaming piles of food. “It’s fortunate that I’m here, then.” She gave a tight smile, lifting up a little clay cup to her lips.

“That’s what they—” Had they told me I was supposed to meet Lynne for breakfast? They’d only said I had breakfast _plans_. I’d assumed it was with Lynne but…

“Did you give them your true name?” Tamlin asked, releasing me as soon as I was in the room. I felt worse for not having his hands on me. I watched as he did something, touching the sides of the wall where the crystal had been cut from the door—and sliding his hand towards the opening. In a rush, the crystal formed over the opening, closing the room so there were no exits, no sign that the way to the hall had ever existed.

“No.” I frowned at the lack of door.

“Good.” He nodded, then motioned for the table with the hand that his seven golden bands on his bicep. “Please, sit. I’d… very much like you to join us for breakfast.”

Lynn gave me a smile, which gave me the strength to sit at the table, my back to where the door was supposed to be. Lynn was still sipping from her clay cup. “How was your morning, Vorta?”

“Fine. It was odd…”

"You really shouldn't invite people into your rooms that you don't know." Lynne said.

"I thought they were new ladys-in-waiting." I murmured, rubbing the new scar on my hand.

“Those two are my Uncles spies.” Tamlin said, sighing. “Ignore them. They are like Lucien, and anything but kind.”

“How have I never seen them before?” I asked, not reaching for the steaming piles of food in front of me. I’d never eaten with them, I realized. All my years here and I’d never once shared a meal with them. It was odd, to see. As if I’d interrupted something intimate.

“My Uncle’s people… keep to themselves.” Tamlin said. “They twist their truths like a Night Courter.”

I frowned. “What… do you mean?” The headache was starting to come back. I resisted the urge to rub my temples.

Lynn laughed. “Oh, I had no idea you didn’t know.” She said, her laughter shaking life into me. “We cannot lie, Vorta. No faerie can lie.” Her mouth twisted into a roguish grin. “Yes, we can twist truths, we can omit the important details, we can lead away—but no lie can come out of a Faerie’s lips. To do so would lead instantly to our insanity.”

That…I blinked at her. “How?” How had I not known that? Why had I not been told?

“That’s very complicated.” Tamlin said, shifting in his seat. I watched him, drinking in the lines of him, the muscles and smooth skin. The freckles on his chest. The strangeness of the piercings in his nipples. “One that many Fae scholars have wrestled over for centuries.” He smiled, and it wasn’t like Lynn’s smile. It didn’t remind me of the sun peaking over the sky. It  _was_  the sun. His eyes crinkled, his expressive mouth showing beautiful white teeth, his green-gold eyes glowing. I was helpless to smile back, feeling a lovesick fool for the expression on my face. “As far as I, or everyone else knows, it has to do with the magic.” He said.

“Magic is a reflection, in its most simple terms. What we give to it, it gives back to us—” Lynn said.

“Like Mother Nature.” I knew a girl, once, who was prone to mumbling about Mother Nature. She cursed Mother Nature, saying that the Mother was fucking with her by bringing bad weather and worse fate. That what she’d done wasn’t supposed to bring her such bad luck…the girl… the girl had explained it in the same way: as a give and take. Who _was_ that girl?

“Yes.” Lynn, said, grinning. “Oh! You know of our Goddess?”

“Your—”

“Mother Nature is our Goddess. Something the governess really should have explained to you.” Tamlin said, smiling gently and dipping some of his bread into a strange light brown mush on his plate. He held the bread oddly in his hands, cupping it with his fingers so the bread made a kind of bowl to scoop. “We have many other Gods and Goddesses—but none as powerful or revered”. He placed the bread into his mouth. “She lives in the Ancient Forrest, the only Boundary in this entire land that cannot change or be taken.”

“Mother Nature gives us our magic. Our long lives. We give Her substance, an extension of Herself. I won’t go into scripture but through the magic, She gives us guidelines to live by, reflections of Her own limitations. One, the names of things, the True Names, is absolute power. Everything from stone to plant to Fae to emotion has a True Name. If you know it, you have mastery over it. Power.” I glanced over at Tamlin, who was openly staring at me. I looked back to Lynn. “Another rule is that we cannot lie. I think, personally, that the two are tied together. If we spoke an untruth, it would muddle the true nature of things, ruining the magic of names, even if they aren’t True. Many a minds have gone insane because people had thought that they could cheat and lie. In the end, they end up fools, screaming at odd things and telling such strange stories…”

“The rules also have to do with how magic is shaped and owned. Boundaries and body-forms and glamour.” Tamlin said.

“Yes. You remember learning about the Boundaries?” I nodded. “A Boundary is a little like reality.” Tamlin said, grabbing his own clay pot. “And reality is truth.”

I looked to the food. There were strange pieces of flat bread in the center in a bowl, their crust crackly but insides soft. I grabbed one, mimicking their plates by putting it to the side and loading up my plate with the sauces in the middle. The red one tasted of berries. The brown one of hops and grains and beans. I dipped my bread into the piles, aware that I needed to pace myself, look more a lady in front of Tamlin.

I kept sneaking glances at him. He was always staring at me when I did.

“I… will you tell me more, about Amarantha?” I asked.

Lynne gasped, but I didn’t look away from Tamlin’s burning green gaze. He seemed to be searching for something—and finding me lacking.

“No.” He said, going back to his food.

I turned back to my own, feeling my headache pulsing with head thundering heartbeat.


	9. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nesta POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All-right all-right. I'm done with editing! Hurray. New stuff on the way.

I stayed at the Inn for a single night. As the dawn rose, I thanked the Inn Keeper for his hospitality and didn’t look back. He seemed relieved. He hadn’t liked that I’d demanded a room for the night. Hadn’t liked that I’d said I would pay for the room by working for a few hours. Hadn’t told me no, either.

I was a terrible waitress anyway. A few customers had even told me it. Before I splashed beer in their face.

I walked out with the dawn light. The gates to the town weren’t even open as I walked to the ugly wooden enclosure and slammed my fist into the door of the watch-house. A bleary, drunken, smelling brute of a guard stumbled out, hiccupping and wiping his eyes and demanding I go away.

“No,” I said, head held high, feeling the cold kiss of the morning touch me. “Let me through.” He tried to refuse—said to come back later. “Let me through,” I said again. Furry—there was always furry in me nowadays—burred low and harsh in my gut, warming me so that only my flesh was made cold by the winter. “I demand to leave this stinking cesspit of a town!” The word was too big for him, I could tell. No wonder Feyre had gotten along with these brutes.

“I ain’t allowed to let no one in or out.” He grumbled. I could hear voices from behind him now, in the little dark space that smelled of piss and body odor and booze. Asking what was going on. “Some Lady wants me to let her through.” The guard called back.

Another drunken buffoon came forward. He took one look at me and said, “Let her through.”

“Wah?” The other, pathetic guard asked.

“I don’t want no fucking noble screaming at me all damn morning. She wants to go into the road when the thieves are still a lurkin’, it’s her business.” The man shrugged. He walked back in.

I did not let his words scare me. I will not be afraid. A thing I had told myself so many times, so many days, that it had become more of a mantra than an internal command. I will not be afraid. I will not be afraid.

But I was always afraid. And I was always angry.

The doors opened, just wide enough for a body to pass through, the wood moving through the slush of mud and digging into the already well-worn grooves. I walked through without a second look and hurried on the road. My feet stomped on cold, frozen earth. My face was stung in the wind. The purse I’d been given jangled on the belt of my dress. As I walked, I ignored the aching in my calves, the hurt of my feet, the slow and steady pressure that was beginning in my side.

Fuck the pain. Fuck the road. Fucking living so damn far from any kind of civilizations, even if Quora was more of a disgrace than civilization.

I hadn’t slept all night, but then, I rarely ever slept. Most nights I’d lay awake, listening to Elain sleeping, listening to the murmuring dreams of the beast that lay in the living room. I’d lay there, and I’d fume, and I’d think. Last night had been no different in that regard, except for the fact that I was achingly alone in the bed. No one to listen to, nothing to do…

I would get her back.

And I will not be afraid.

It took me half the day to get back to the thing that called itself a village—a tiny collection of houses and farms surrounding a common well too diseased to offer any good water. Dead rats lay inside the murk pit. I’d challenged Camille Durose, one of the farming girls, to drink from it a few years back. Testing to see what it would do. She’d died of some disease a few weeks later. Her parents had buried her. Popped out a few more babies. Made the older ones work the soil just like Camille had.

I sneered at the damn well as I passed it. I would not let what I’d done shame me. I would accept it, move on. She had died. I had been a stupid, foolish child. I will never make the same mistake again.

I passed by the barn, then. Where I’d found my evil little sister turned into the true matricide-monster that she was. All torn apart, savagely raped, beaten within an inch of her life. I had done good, there. I had closed her legs and put a cloak over her body. Coins had been splashed onto her. Good, gold coins. I snatched them up despite the blood. I thought—if she dies, then I will go to Quora and I will get a job to feed Elain—and banged on the Durose family door. They were more than willing to get a cart to go to the Town and find a healer for her.

The coins paid for the food necessary until Feyre, the beast-bitch, returned. Eyes dead, blood staining her hands.

I walked past it all. Past the Durose family’s empty house. Into the woods. There was a tiny trail that led to the camp-fire grounds that Baba Yaga held her weekly little ritual. I walked past even that, entering gross snowy banks and low hanging trees to a small trail that everyone knew led to Baba Yaga’s cottage. Children were always dared to come up to it, knocking on the door. No one ever had. 

I will not be afraid.

The cottage was bigger than mine. More stable. It had a shingled roof, the mortar in between the stones that held it upright fresh and unmolested by the weather. Vines grew on its side, withered now from the weather, and there was a small planter where a garden would be during summer. A chimney let the smoke rise up and up and up into the air. No one had ever come close to it. Baba Yaga said she’d eat any child who dared.

I will not be afraid.

I was, though. It was a deep and quailing thing. It made me shiver as if it was the cold itself come to enter me and cry out its lonely wind between my ribs. As if it could claw at my skin and go deep, deep into me and douse the burning flame that always presided in my chest. As if it could snuff the life out of me. The closer I walked to it, the worse the feeling got until I was dizzy with it all. Still, I walked. One foot in front of the other, an unrelenting stomp through the snow onto a small stone walkway. Up a tiny snow-soaked porch. To the door.

I banged on it, nearly howling from the feeling of fear.

Nothing.

I banged again.

Still—nothing. Furious, I grabbed the metal handle of the door that bit at me, as if trying to burn my skin with freezing cold, and I pressed. The door opened on creaky hinges and the smell of dust and rot hit my nose before it swung open into blackness.

The cottage was empty. It was dark inside, only one room with a straw-covered floor and cobwebs. Spiders and rats were the only thing occupying the place. The fire—the one that had been belting out so much smoke—was dead and empty as if it hadn’t been lit for years.

Magic, then. I grinned, stepping over the threshold. Immediately the quaking fear left me, left my body, and I was all warmth and fury again. I welcomed it like a lover as I breathed in the stale air. There was no furniture, so I had nowhere to sit and wait out the time. No wood, and no knowledge of how to make a fire without a burning ember, so I would have to wait it out in the cold. But I was more than sure it wouldn’t take long. If the witch Baba Yaga had taken the time to mask the cottage in some kind of magic, surely it would tell her when that magic was breached.

How stupid, for no one to realize that she wasn’t human. An old lady in the woods telling faerie stories? It was irony that those faerie stories were based on! And more than that, the old hag and talked to a true Fae…

I batted away a spider. I looked out murky and grimy windows to a cold winter wasteland. I thought of Elain’s songs.

She’d been my light, my happiness, for as long as she’d been alive. Mother had never paid much attention to me, still trying to build up a reputable front to father’s illegal trading business and call it merchanting. Parties had to be thrown. People had to be talked to for contracts and fake King’s seals. People had to stop seeing the Archeron family as rich and thieving gangsters they’d been for generations. There was no time for me in all that. So Nanny Sue had taken care of me. She’d had the warmest hands. Made the best soup. Never treated me like a dumb child and never told me made up stories of the world. Instead, she told me gossip. Told me truth. Told me how my Mother and Father taken over the Archeron their empire and what had gone wrong—why they would fail.

She’d been right about it, too. The Archeron Trading Business had crumbled into the mud, just like Nanny Sue had said it would.

By the time Mother was pregnant again—by the kind and charming Peddler who always stopped by, Nanny Sue said, the one with the wicked smiles and the know-how to make any woman blush—the Archeron empire was rather stable. The Peddler came by a lot to sell valuable little trinkets from halfway around the world. I hadn’t wanted there to be a sister. Hadn’t wanted Nanny Sue’s attention to be taken away from me, to have anyone else hear her golden truths.

But then Elain was born. She’d made such a beautiful baby. Big brown eyes—that of the peddler’s—with a tiny mouth to gurgle and spew and grin. I’d fallen in love immediately. Helped Nanny Sue with all the burping and feeding and playing. Gotten testy with her when I noticed that she was neglecting Elain as she cried in the crib—to go gossip with maids!—and had gotten her fired. Elain had grown up with a different Nanny, and with me. Her big, trustful eyes never left me. Her hand was always in mine. Her smiles were so bright. I made sure she was hidden from the things I knew, the things Nanny Sue had taught me. She did not need to be tarnished by such truths.

I had helped Elain with her first steps. My words—my songs—had been her first high-pitched mumbles. It had been me who had taught her how to dress and I convinced mother to get her into singing classes instead of acting, like Mother had wanted. It had been me who had carried her away into the garden when it was clear that Father was going to go into one of his rages again and start breaking things, breaking people.  It had been beautiful bliss, having my sister, my daughter, my best friend and needing only her.

And then Mother got pregnant again. I didn’t need Nanny Sue to know that it was the sharp Nobleman from across the ocean who had warmed her bed and seeded the evil little thing. Mother had not tried to hide it. Had even thrown it in Father’s face, saying that she was going to leave him, be a true Lady. He’d almost killed her that night.

I’d thought, at the time, that I was going to have a new, beautiful thing to take care of. A wonderful soul to nurture and grow like I had Elain. I’d begged him not to hurt mother, begged him not to hurt the child living inside her. Now I wish that I had let him.

Feyre came out wrong. Fucked up. Mother had screamed long and loud and horrible all night long, screaming as the contractions hit her over and over. Feyre came out silent, though, so silent they’d thought she was dead. Her eyes were like Mother’s. She made no sounds, no gurgles, no yips, no murmurs, no bubbles. Even when I reached into her crib to pinch her—even when I stole the milk from the bottle—she did not make a sound. It wasn’t until she was two did she say a single thing: “Don’t tell me what to do.” She’d told me. In a child’s voice, young and hard to understand… but too mature.

Mother was distant after Feyre had been born. Brokenhearted because her Lord hadn’t taken her. She’d thrown governesses at Feyre, music-teachers and math-teachers and language tutors and oh—so many it was hard to think of these days. Their faces all blurred, their subjects all muddled. Each and every one of them had walked away after a week, saying that she was too much of a problem child. That their job was wasted on a girl who kept running away to chase alley cats and sneak off into the woods.

I hated her. Even then. But I could forgive her. She hadn’t chosen to be so strange-witted. Hadn’t chosen her strange love of Mother Nature or the grace she had when she danced. Hadn’t even chosen not to need me to take care of her.

She _had_ chosen to kill Mother, though. And for that, Feyre was evil. She’d started the decent of the Archeron good fortune. Had the hounds barking at Father’s feet. The debt collectors taking everything. Had father’s spirit broken because without Mother’s fickle love—he was nothing. No one. And Elain and I became poor. I watched every day as her cheeks got hollower. Her bright and beautiful eyes became sunken in. Her ribs started to show. The period she’d just received left her as if it had never been there before.

Feyre deserved worse than her fucked up face.

I watched the cold snow through the murky glass.

Eventually, Baba Yaga came. The door banged open and I didn’t turn as I said, “Brinda, stop.” The air swept through the room, cold and biting. The door creaked and slammed against the stones.

I will not be afraid.

I turned very slowly, to see that the witch Baba Yaga had stopped in the doorway. She stood, tall, hunched over, wrinkly and ugly. Her gray and wired hair flew as the wind grabbed at it. Her old, beady eyes looked tiny in her wrinkles, so deep they were like the divets of mud from the Town gate.

I felt the smile creep over my face, slow and wonderful. “Hello, Baba Yaga.” I said.

“Child.” Baba Yaga greeted, politer than I’d ever seen her before.

“Tell me, Brinda,” I watched her body moved at the name. She didn’t so much flinch as look—tugged. Like someone had shaken her a little. “Are you a human witch, or a faerie?”

She hissed out the word, let it be carried with the wind into the abandoned cottage, old and gravelly and vile. “Neither.”

“Interesting. Give me a chair to sit on.” I ordered, wondering at the extent of her power.

A chair appeared. It was in front of her, in her hands in an instant. Old and worn and looking like it was going to collapse if she so much as put it on the floor. I tisked at her. “Is that the extent of your powers or are you trying to test my patience?” I demanded.

She did not answer. Her name had not been said. “Brinda,” Again, that body-tug. That fear and hatred in her old, ugly face. “I want you to produce a chair that is fine and sturdy and comfortable. I want you to place in exactly two inches in front of me so that I may sit on it. I want you to produce a fire in your hearth, one that will warm the room but not destroy it. One that will warm me but not harm me. One that will not fill the room with smoke. Do it now.”

In an instant. It was done.

I admired the chair in front of me as the fire crackled in the hearth as if it had been going for a few minutes now. It was of good wood, had a leather cushion stapled into it. I walked around it, flared out my cloak, and sat. “Brinda, I want you to tell me, in very specific terms, how you came to the human world and what you are doing here and why.”

“I came through the portal. It’s a small tear in the reality-magic that separates the mortals from the Fae. I crawl through it every month so that I can tell stories. I used to tell stories to the children, before the Separation. I used to let the humans know of our people. I want to continue telling them. So that they do not forget.” Her wrinkled mouth closed.

“Brinda, if you lead me to the tear and walk me through it, will it in any way, shape, or form harm my body or my mind?”

Her mouth twisted, which made the webbing wrinkles twist. “It will make you dizzy.”

I nodded. “Brinda,” I said, taking a bit of dust from my cloak. “You will not harm me in any way. You will not do anything that would lead me to harm, and you will specifically save me from harm even if it will mean you harm.” I looked up to her, watching the hatred form deep into her eyes. “You will obey me in all things, without the use of your name, and you will be forever by my side, protecting me.”

Her body sagged at that. Like old and wrinkled flesh and bones dropping as if dropped by a puppet master’s strings. “You do not know what you have done,” She said, her gravelly voice shrill and haunted. I will not be afraid. “I will be left watching over your bones until I myself die, with that order of yours.”

“It is still an order.” I shrugged, wondering at that. If I’m specific, it gets done the way I want it to. But I’d have to be very careful with my words from now on. Think of every scenario, every order. Especially if I didn’t have to use her first name to do it. I could sigh and say ‘fuck me’ in anger and she’d probably have to do it.

I stood. “Shall we go?” I asked, grinning. “Take me to the portal.”

 

Apparently, the portal was a strange twist and bend of trees in the forest a few miles away from the cottage. The trees leaned on each other here, their branches forming an arch. She walked through them and I could see her walking, so I followed—

It was like spinning in one direction for so long that your equilibrium goes off balance. I crashed into the ground, dizzy from one step, into darkness and a forest floor. I waited until it passed, though it took a few minutes, to see Baba Yaga standing in front of me, withered lips twisted, waiting. She was grinning like a fool, enjoying the pleasure of watching me dizzy.

“Fuc—” I stopped myself short. I’d have to be careful indeed.

I stood slowly, leaning on a tree that was… unlike any tree I’d ever seen before. It had bark, yes, but it… it glowed. Soft and dark blue, the bark glowed. And the moss that clung to it glowed.  The plants the sprang about had little bulbs that glowed soft yellows and pinks and oranges. The bugs that moved through the air trailed light. So even though all was dark, the night sky black and twinkling with stars so close it felt as if the sky itself was reachable. The night here was alive. Bright.

“What is this place?” I asked, awed.

“The Court of Night.” Baba Yaga said.

“I’ve never seen plants like this before.” I reached over, touching one. It had long stalks that poked from the ground—little glowing blue leaves under it, showing the soil—with huge and folded leaves that glowed a soft purple. Inside, a tiny pollen stem glowed a hazy pink.

Baba Yaga said nothing. “Is this where you live?” I ask.

“It is my Court.” Baba Yaga drawled. “I live within it’s Boundary.”

“In the woods?” I arched an eyebrow. “Like a savage?”

“Within a house.” She snapped back.

I was about to open my mouth to talk to her more when something strange happened. The lights started to wink out. The glow of the plants—of the little insects—died one by one, coming closer and closer till we were drenched in true darkness. Darkness so pure that even the too close stars did nothing to brighten the way. I could hardly see the hand in front of my face. And then… another darkness… slow, creeping, agile. It flowed from the grown, between the trees, like a mist that terrified me so much I took a step back. I did not want to know what it was like to be touched by that darkness.

“What is going on?” Baba Yaga said nothing. “I demand you answer me!”

Her voice was like a breathy hiss. “He is coming.”

“Who? Who?” I turned, walking back through the trees when I had come from, only I was not made dizzy, was not brought back to the land of snow and mortal-fears. “Why is the portal not there? What happened to it?”

“The land shifts. The portal is never in the same place twice.” Baba Yaga had disappeared into the inky blackness, though I could hear her close enough.

I whirled. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to escape. That darkness was everywhere. I did not scream as it came upon me, but it was a near thing. My legs felt heavy. But the darkness did not hurt. It touched me, a thing that I could not feel physically, but mentally. As if I was a pool of water and the darkness was ink to be splashed into me, it dropped into my mind, spreading, swirling, leaving patterns and changing and—

The world trembled under my feet. The air had changed. Something had come. Something that—

I screamed as a face appeared in front of me. Dark honeyed skin, black hair, beautiful features accompanied by pointed ears. His eyes were blood red, with strange pupils like two x’s made of slashing black in blood. His mouth was open, wider than I’d seen anything but a snake have, so that I could see the four glistening white fangs in the front, the sharp fangs in the back molars.

I fell to the ground, shoving backwards, scrambling over the plants and ground that I could no longer see. It was like I was in a nonexistent place. A place of pure blackness and a monster whose mouth slowly closed into a cheek-splitting grin, exposing so—so many teeth.

“Mmmmm… what do I have here?” He asked, his voice a dangerous, horrible thing. Like a cat’s purr. “A little mortal? In my lands?”

His body hunched, then he fell to the ground on his hands like a strange animal. It reminded me a bear that had been on two feet, then decided to fall down to all fours. The ground shook from the movement, from the tiny, lithe way he slithered over to me. As if he was a cat, shoulders rolling, hands caressing the darkness of the earth. “Your fear is rather sweet smelling.” He purred.

I screamed at him to go away. My back hit something, and I screamed again. I would turn around to look, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the slow, rolling movements of him coming towards me. Of his strange bloody eyes and the sharp grin on his face. He had four fangs that I could see. Two sharp canines, sharp, smaller teeth on the outside. I knew that more waited inside. A mouth like that could tear me apart, slash my skin, crush my bones, rip through muscle.

I wasn’t shaking. I was too frozen to shake.

He came slowly, taking his time on hands and knees. His fingers brushed through the darkness, his lazy, bloody eyes never leaving my face. He moved unlike any being I’d seen before. Though he was on his hands and knees, though his shoulders were rolling with every arm movement, his spine swaying with every knee movement—he was too smooth. Like an animal. But not like an animal.

His right hand came to the side of my ankle. I was pushed up against the solid darkness behind me, my knees tucked into my chest. His left hand came to the outside of my hips. His face got so close I could smell him, like rosemary and sandalwood and citrus. His mouth opened impossibly, exposing all those sharp back teeth…

His tongue came out—a bright red—and touched my cheek in a single, hot lick. His saliva smelled of pure sandalwood. Tasting me before the meal—

“Do not harm her.” Baba Yaga said, somewhere in the darkness. I flinched at the sound of her voice. “She has bound me to her. By name.”

I thought he was terrifying before. I thought he was the scariest thing I’d ever seen and would ever see in my entire life. But then his face shifted, and a snarl broke out from somewhere in his chest, and I realized that he had not been angry, as he’d come for me. He’d been playing with me before. Now he was angry. Now, the darkness suffocated my mind. His face—oh god, his face.

Hot and stinking liquid trickled out from between my legs. It pooled in my dress, making me sit in a warm, wet puddle.

“ _How did you get her name_!” The monster roared, both verbally and in my head. He was a beast.

I only screamed. I put my hands over my ears, screaming and screaming and screaming.

“I like you scaring the piss straight out of her—but I can’t have her dying on me.” Baba Yaga growled, from somewhere far away.

The darkness was gone in an instant. I watched it being sucked into the man’s clothes, his hair, his skin, being absorbed into him. His bloody, terrible eyes became black as if the darkness was filling them, and the lights of the forest turned on one by one—lighting the woods.

I was backed up against a tree. A plant was two inches away from tickling my face. I was panting so hard I was hyperventilating.

Yet I still could not look away from him. His furious face snarled at me as he backed up, so he was sitting on his knees in front of me. He was wearing all black. Pure black. “How?” Is all he asked.

Baba Yaga told him. She was standing a little farther to his left, behind him. She was watching me with glee in her evil, wrinkled face. “She’s one of the human village girls. Hasn’t told me why or how, just came into the glamoured cottage I use as cover and bound me by my name as soon as I opened the door.”

The sound that came from the man was a hiss, an evil, horrible hiss. “Girl, you will tell me where you learned her name.”

“F-F-F-F-“ I was shaking now, so bad. So scared. I was crying, humiliated.

His hand came up and slapped me across the face. “Tell me.” He demanded. My cheek stung worse than when Feyre had slapped me in the square. He made my neck hurt from the movement, my entire body shoved into the soil and plants as I struggled to breath.

“From you!” I yelled into the ground, before dissolving into humiliated tears.

A horrible sensation came over me then. Like what the darkness had done to me when the man—Rhys, for he could be no-one else—as he’d first grown angry. It felt like hands, like claws, were squeezing at my mind. As if I was nothing more than a balloon he could pop. I wailed. “You told it to my sister! You said it in front of her! She talks in her sleep! She said it!”

Silence. The claws stayed but did not press in. “What are you talking about, mortal?” The man snarled. His smell, his horrible smell, was everywhere. I’d never smell sandalwood again without puking. Never.

Through my tears, I explained it. How I had heard my sister mumbling in her sleep. How I was prone to listen at the door, to hear her. How she talked that night of strange Fae and darkness and stories. About a Elven Fae named Rhys, about an old Hag named Brinda. When Feyre had explained where she was going and how she was going to come into Fae, she mentioned seeing a Fae man with Baba Yaga. The two-woman had to be one and the same.

Silence. The earth pulsed, as if the darkness was just under the surface, ready to come alive. And then… “Fey is here?” Soft. Surprised. Pleased.

I peeked up at him through my tears. He was still sitting there on his knees, but his now black eyes had gone far away. There was a smile to his full, fanged mouth. “Fey is in Prythia?” Those black eyes turned to me, and I flinched into the ground. “You are her sister?”

“Y-yes.”

He nodded. “Sorry to have scared you, then.” He stood up, walking away. “Come on.” He waved a hand—

The strangest sensation I have ever felt gripped me then. As if someone had grabbed my spine and yanked.

I was on the ground, gasping, moaning, on a hard, marble floor. I looked up, bleary-eyed, to see myself… in a strange building. Darkness was everywhere and the stones of the pillars glowed from an inner pale light. The furniture was all lounge furniture, chaises, large winged chairs… there was an open fire in the center of the room. There was no ceiling, now walls. Just darkness and fire and open furniture and pillars that looked out into snowy mountains.

Rhys was still walking as if he hadn’t just moved us across space and time. He lazily laid back in one of the chairs, his arms going over the wings, his feet sprawling before him. Baba Yaga sat delicately on a chaise, her eyes as sharp as her posture. Apparently, she did not know what to think of this, either.

“I do not like you.” The man, Rhys, said. He was staring at me, still sprawled on the ground. “I very much want to kill you. But, Brinda has said no. So I will not.” He inclined his head towards her. “Though it would be much easier if you just killed her, salted her bones, and carried them around in a tote for safekeeping.” He said, conversationally.

Her eyes gleamed. “It is a thought. But I cannot let her die now. I would have to sacrifice myself to save her.”

“She was that specific?” He asked, the low, horrible furry just under the surface. I trembled.

Baba Yaga nodded her head.

His eyes whipped back to me. I moaned at the glare of them. “Explain.” He demanded.

“My—my sister was taken,” I said, wishing I could tear my eyes away from him. Some long-buried instinct said not to, to not let myself even blink in fear that he would be upon me.

“A shame. I pity the fool who thinks he can tame or harm her. What does that have to do with Prythian?”

“She was taken by one of the Fae. For Tithe.” I spat at him, ashamed, furious, terrified.

“By who?” Again—that horrible double voice. The claws against the bubble of my mind.

“A man!” I screamed. “Golden-skinned, green-eyed! Elven Fae!” I wailed.

The claws let up. “Tamlin has taken a human.” He murmured, all that anger gone. He was a psychopath. A crazed, deranged monster! He sat there, rubbing his chin with his fingertips, lost in thought for a second. “Go on. Fey was taken by Tamlin for Tithe? It’s a little odd, he’s too vain to appreciate her for anything more than her sacrifice.”

I felt my blood chill. That horrible wind was back, threatening to suffocate me with fear. “No—my other sister. She was taken. Fey went to go find her. She left me and—and I decided fuck that. So I found Brin—”

“Do not say her name.” I flinched.

“You’re a hypocrite!” I screamed past the pain. He already said he wouldn’t kill me. What else could he do? “The only reason why I know it is because you used it against her too!”

“You know nothing.” He waved the hand that he’d been stroking his chin with at me, dismissing me.

Furious, I turned to Baba Yaga. “Explain to me how it is any different.”

“I gave him my name willingly, to prove my servitude to his kingdom.” She said, annoyed. “He has never used it to control, as you have. But out of familiarity. Proof that I will behave while in his lands. So, I don’t have to go back to the Prison.”

Rhys was still. Somehow that, too, terrified me. “I very much want to kill you.” He said, his voice as soft, husky whisper. I trembled. I had not gotten up from the ground. “So. You are telling me that Tamlin has taken one of your sisters. Fey has come on her own. And now so have you… three of you mortals are here?” He asked. “And do you have the bond?” When I only blinked, his teeth flashed. “Do you have the mark on you, girl? The three swirls meeting at the center?” My birthmark? It was my left hip. I nodded. “You’re sister too?” Elain’s was the bottom of her right foot. I nodded to him.

He went back to stroking his chin. As if he was used to a beard being there.

We all stayed where we were, Baba Yaga tense on her chaise lounge. Me, trembling on the marble floor by the fire, soaked in my own piss and tears. And Rhys, the monster of the Night, rubbing his chin and thinking.

After who knows how long—my eyes never left him, I didn’t dare move—he blinked, looked down at me and said, “Yes. I can use this.”

I will not be afraid.

It never felt more like a lie.

 


End file.
